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Blackberry Beverage

A chilled blackberry beverage made with blackberries, water, lemon, orange water, sugar, and ice.

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

Blackberry Beverage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Crush the blackberries in a bowl.

  2. Pour the cold water over the crushed blackberries.

  3. Add the lemon slice and orange water.

  4. Let the mixture stand for 3 to 4 hours.

  5. Strain through a jelly bag.

Sweeten and serve

  1. Sweeten with syrup made from dissolving white sugar in hot water, then cooling it.

  2. Serve immediately with broken ice in glasses or chill the pitcher on ice until ready to serve.

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 + 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

Fresh blackberries
Provide the main fruit flavor, color, and natural pulp for the juice.
Cold water
Draws flavor and color out of the crushed blackberries and dilutes the juice.
White sugar
Adds sweetness, balancing the tartness of the blackberries and lemon.

The step that matters

Straining through a jelly bag. Fine pulp and seeds pass through loose straining, leaving the juice cloudy and gritty. A jelly bag holds back solids so the juice runs clear.

“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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