Name: Cooling Drinks
Ingredients: 2 to 3 lumps of sugar; 1 lemon; ½ to 1 pint cold or iced water; 1 to 2 bottles of soda water

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 ↓

Cooling Drinks

Ingredients

2 to 3 lumps of sugar
1 lemon
½ to 1 pint cold or iced water
1 to 2 bottles of soda water

Directions

Rub the sugar on the rind of the lemon.
Squeeze out the juice from the lemon.
Add the lemon juice to ½ to 1 pint of cold or iced water or 1 to 2 bottles of soda water.

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

Lemon: Provides the acidity and aroma that give the drink its fresh, bright flavour.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and, rubbed on the rind, picks up fragrant lemon oils for extra aroma.

“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.