Skip to main content
Drink

Drink, Pretty Creature, Drink

A chilled lemon peel infusion sweetened with sugar, optionally flavored with berry juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and berry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 57 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Drink, Pretty Creature, Drink

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the peel from the lemon in thin strips and place them in a bowl.

  2. Add 1½ cups of boiling water to the bowl, cover, and let it stand for 10 minutes.

  3. Add the lemon juice and 2 tablespoons of sugar to the mixture.

  4. When cold, strain the mixture and add ice.

  5. For a sweeter drink, add more water and a little extra sugar if desired.

  6. Optionally, add berry juice for improved flavor and appearance.

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 + berrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. Sugar + berrytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together146 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Lemon
Its peel and juice provide the drink's sharp, fragrant citrus flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the lemon's acidity.

Swap the berry

The recipe marks berry as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Berrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, 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.

More lemon water recipes

Ice 46Barley 3Ice Cream 3 See all 30 →

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes