Skip to main content
Drink

Strawberry Cocktail

A chilled beverage made from mashed strawberries, lemon juice, water, sugar, and ice.

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

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 ↓

Strawberry Cocktail

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mash the strawberries well.

  2. Add the cold water and lemon juice, and let stand for 3 hours.

Sweeten and chill

  1. Strain the mixture, add the sugar, and stir until dissolved.

  2. Let stand on ice for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve in tall, narrow glasses, garnished with 3 or 4 whole strawberries, cut in half.

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).

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

Strawberries
Supplies the main fruit flavor, color and body of the drink.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the strawberry flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the drink and balances the acidity of the lemon.

The step that matters

Stir the sugar until fully dissolved. Sugar must dissolve completely in the liquid to sweeten it evenly. Undissolved sugar settles to the bottom, so the first glasses poured can taste less sweet than the last.

“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.

You might also like

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