Skip to main content
Drink

Excellent Lemonade

A chilled fruit beverage made with water, sugar, pineapple, banana, orange, lemon, and ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Excellent Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil water and sugar together for 20 minutes.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

Combine and stand

  1. Add grated pineapple, sliced bananas, juiced oranges, and juiced lemons.

  2. Let the mixture stand for 5 to 6 hours.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the lemonade and serve over chopped 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.

  1. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Banana + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Pineapple + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolved in boiling water to make a syrup that sweetens the punch.
Lemons
Juice supplies sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the syrup and fruit.
Oranges
Juice adds sweetness, body and citrus aroma to the punch.
Grated pineapple
Adds sweetness, tropical aroma and extra acidity to the punch.
Bananas
Add body and a soft, creamy texture as they break down in the liquid.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pineapple, banana, orange. 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.

You might also like

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipes