Skip to main content
Drink

Mint Ice

Mint Ice is a frozen mint and lemon beverage made by boiling water, sugar, mint, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mint and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,998 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Mint Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil water and sugar together for five minutes.

Prepare the mint

  1. Remove leaves from mint stalks.

  2. Wash the mint stalks carefully.

  3. Chop the mint finely.

  4. Pound the chopped mint to a pulp.

  5. Work the mint pulp into the hot syrup.

Cool, strain and freeze

  1. Cool the mixture.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Add the lemon juice.

  4. Freeze the mixture.

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. Mint + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,998 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + minttop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

Sugar
Sweetens the ice and keeps it softer by lowering its freezing point.
Fresh mint
Provides the fresh aroma and flavor that define the ice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mint flavor and balances the sweetness.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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 mint ice recipes

Cream 3 See all 7 →

You might also like

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