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Drink

Refreshing Drinks

A chilled drink made by mashing fruit, adding cold water, straining, and sweetening with sugar and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Refreshing Drinks

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Mash the fruit well in a basin.

  2. Pour the cold spring water over the mashed fruit.

Strain

  1. Wash some paper in water until it becomes a pulp.

  2. Add the pulp to the basin.

  3. Pour the mixture into a jelly bag.

  4. Strain off the juice.

Sweeten and serve

  1. Add sugar boiled to a syrup and lemon juice if desired.

  2. Serve the fruit-water in glasses.

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

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

  2. White currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

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

Fresh fruit
Provides the main flavour and colour of the drink.
Paper pulp (in the method)
Acts as a filter that helps catch fine fruit particles during straining.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white currant, sugar):

  1. Currantfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Red currantfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white currant, sugar. 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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