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Drink

Lemon Cordial

A preserved lemon juice and sugar mixture flavored with lemon peel, sweetened, then mixed with white brandy and aged.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Lemon Cordial

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Remove the yellow rind from the lemons.

  2. Cut the lemons in half and squeeze out all the juice.

  3. For each pint of juice, add ½ pound of loaf sugar and the lemon peel.

  4. Cover and let it sit for 24 hours.

Infuse and bottle

  1. Mix with an equal quantity of white brandy and let it sit for a month.

  2. Strain through a linen bag and filter through blotting paper before bottling.

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

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

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Lemon + brandytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

Fine lemons
Supply the juice and the peel, which carry the sharp acidity and the aromatic oils.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the juice and balances the acidity of the lemons.
White brandy
Adds alcohol that preserves the cordial and carries the lemon flavour.

The step that matters

Letting the sugar and peel sit for 24 hours. The sugar draws liquid out of the peel and dissolves into the juice, extracting the lemon oils. Skipping or shortening this rest leaves the cordial weaker in aroma and flavour.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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