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Drink

Effervescing Drink

A fizzy lemon-ginger drink made with tartaric acid, soda, sugar, lemon essence, ginger, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Effervescing Drink

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the powder

  1. Mix tartaric acid, carbonate of soda, and powdered sugar in a bowl.

  2. Add essence of lemon and powdered ginger to the mixture.

Serve

  1. Take 1 teaspoon of the mixture in a tumbler of cold water and stir well.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Tartaric acid
Provides the acid that reacts with the carbonate to make the drink fizz.
Carbonate of soda
Releases carbon dioxide gas when it meets the acid and water, creating the fizz.
Powdered loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and bulk to the powder, balancing the sourness of the acid.
Essence of lemon
Adds the lemon aroma and flavour.

The step that matters

Stir the powder into the water. The acid and carbonate react as soon as they meet water, releasing carbon dioxide. Stirring well spreads the powder evenly so the drink fizzes consistently, and it is best drunk while the bubbles are still active.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Orangefits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Vanillafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger. 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.

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