Name: Excellent Lemonade
Ingredients: 6 lemons; 6 tablespoons of sugar; 1 quart of ice water; maraschino cherries; ice

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 ↓

Excellent Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

Wash and roll the lemons, then slice them thin.
Layer sliced lemons and sugar alternately in a bowl.

Chill and serve

Place the bowl on ice until ready to serve.
Add maraschino cherries and ice water.
Serve with a lump of ice.

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.

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

Lemons: Provide the sour citrus flavor and aromatic oils that define the drink.
Sugar: Sweetens the drink and draws juice out of the sliced lemons as it sits.
Ice water: Dilutes the lemon and sugar mixture into a drinkable, refreshing lemonade.

“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.