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Drink

Lemon Ice

A frozen lemon and orange drink made by steeping rinds, mixing with sugar and water, then freezing while stirring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Lemon Ice

Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

Lemon Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Juice the lemons and the orange, and grate the rind of the lemons.

  2. In a bowl, steep the rinds in the lemon and orange juice for 1 hour.

  3. Strain the mixture, squeezing out all the juice from the rinds.

Make and freeze

  1. Mix in the sugar until dissolved, then add the water.

  2. Pour the mixture into a freezer and freeze, stirring every 30 minutes to beat it until smooth.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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 sharp acidity and the main citrus flavour, with aromatic oils in the rind.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the icy texture by lowering the freezing point.
Sweet orange
Adds sweet citrus aroma and balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.

The step that matters

Stirring while freezing. Stirring every 30 minutes breaks up ice crystals as they form, keeping the texture smooth rather than hard and icy. Without it, large crystals form and the lemonade becomes grainy.

“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.

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