Name: Lemon Ice
Ingredients: 4 cups water; 1 cup lemon juice; 2½ cups sugar; Juice of 2 oranges

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

4 cups water
1 cup lemon juice
2½ cups sugar
Juice of 2 oranges

Directions

Make the syrup

Boil the water and sugar together for 20 minutes to make a syrup.

Finish and freeze

Add the lemon juice and orange juice to the syrup.
Strain the mixture and freeze it.
Serve in frappe 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.

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.

Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar: Dissolves into the boiled water to form a syrup that sweetens the ice and softens its texture.
Lemon juice: Adds the sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and gives the ice its bright flavour.
Orange juice: Adds extra fruit sweetness and aroma, rounding out the citrus flavour.
Water: Forms the base liquid that the sugar dissolves into and that freezes into the ice.

“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.