Name: Lemon or Orange Syrup
Ingredients: 1.5 pounds white sugar; 1 pint juice of lemons or oranges; peel of the fruit

Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓

Lemon or Orange Syrup

Ingredients

1.5 pounds white sugar
1 pint juice of lemons or oranges
peel of the fruit

Directions

Make the syrup

Combine 1.5 pounds of white sugar with 1 pint of juice in a pot.
Add some peel and bring to a boil for 10 minutes.
Strain the mixture and pour it into a corked bottle.

Use

Use the syrup as a beverage or for flavoring pies and puddings.

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.

Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

White sugar: Provides sweetness and body, giving the syrup its thick texture.
Juice of lemons or oranges: Adds acidity and the main citrus flavor to the syrup.
Peel of the fruit: Releases aromatic citrus oils into the syrup during boiling.

“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.