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Fruit Lemonade

Fruit lemonade made with lemon juice, orange slices, orange juice, sugar, water, and served with a maraschino cherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Juice the lemons and add the juice to a large pitcher.

  2. Add the sliced orange, orange juice, and sugar to the pitcher.

  3. Pour in the water and stir until the sugar is dissolved.

  4. Serve in glasses with a Maraschino cherry in each.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

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

Sugar
Sweetens the drink and, once stirred in, dissolves fully into the water.
Lemons
Provide the sharp acidity that balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Sugar left undissolved settles at the bottom of the pitcher, so the first glasses come out less sweet than the last. Stirring thoroughly after adding the water gives an evenly sweetened drink.

“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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