Name: Warm Lemonade
Ingredients: 3 large lemons; 5 tablespoons white granulated sugar; 3 pints boiling water

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 ↓

Warm Lemonade

Ingredients

3 large lemons
5 tablespoons white granulated sugar
3 pints boiling water

Directions

Prepare the lemons

Wash and wipe the lemons.
Peel off the yellow part of the skin thinly and place it in a porcelain pitcher.
Remove the bitter white part of the skin and cut the lemons in half.
Squeeze the juice from the lemons into the pitcher using a lemon squeezer.
Remove the seeds and add the squeezed lemon halves to the pitcher.

Make the lemonade

Add the sugar and beat the mixture for 1-2 minutes.
Pour in the boiling water and stir until the sugar dissolves.
Cover the pitcher with a napkin and let it cool to a drinkable temperature.

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 juice and aromatic peel oils that give the drink its sour, fragrant flavour.
White granulated sugar: Sweetens the drink and balances the lemon's acidity.
Boiling water: Dissolves the sugar and extracts flavour from the lemon peel and halves.

“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.