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Lemon Cordial

A sweet lemon liqueur made by boiling lemons in milk, adding brandy and sugar, then filtering and bottling with lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Cordial

Ingredients

Directions

Make the whey

  1. Cut the lemons and add them to the milk.

  2. Boil until the whey is very clear.

  3. Strain through a sieve.

Sweeten and rest

  1. Add the brandy and sugar to the whey.

  2. Stir until the sugar dissolves.

  3. Let the mixture stand to refine.

Bottle

  1. Add thinly sliced lemon peel to bottles and fill with the cordial.

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 + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  2. Milk + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,738 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 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

Lemons
Their acid curdles the milk, separating the whey and adding sharp citrus flavour.
Milk
Curdles with the lemon acid, and the clear whey becomes the cordial's base.
French brandy
Adds alcohol and warm spirit flavour to the finished cordial.
Clarified sugar
Sweetens the whey and dissolves into it to balance the acidity.

The step that matters

Boil until the whey is very clear. Heating the acidic milk fully separates the curds from the liquid. Straining after this removes the solids that would otherwise cloud the finished cordial.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, brandy, 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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