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To Make Lemon Wine to Drink Like Citron-Water

A fermented beverage made from lemons, brandy, sugar, water, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Make Lemon Wine to Drink Like Citron-Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the infusion

  1. Pare the lemons very thin and place the peels in the brandy. Let them stand for 14 days.

  2. Make a syrup with the lemon juice and 3 pounds of sugar.

Make the fermented water

  1. Boil 15 gallons of water with 40 pounds of sugar for half an hour, then cool it in a tub.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of barm to the cooled water and let it work for 2 days.

Combine and age

  1. Combine the brandy, peels, syrup, and the water mixture. Stir well and close the cask.

  2. Let it stand for 3 months, then bottle it.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Lemon + brandytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Peel supplies aromatic oils and juice supplies sharp acidity.
French brandy
Spirit base that extracts lemon flavour from the peels and preserves the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the lemon's acidity and feeds the yeast.
Barm
Yeast that ferments the sugar water, producing alcohol and flavour.

The step that matters

Add the barm only to cooled water. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid. Cooling the boiled sugar water in a tub first keeps the barm alive so it can ferment the sugars.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (brandy, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against brandy, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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