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Lemon Shrub

A syrup made from lemon juice, sugar, brandy, and lemon peel, steeped for 24 hours.

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 Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pare the rind from the lemons as thin as possible.

  2. Press out and strain the juice.

  3. Add 1 pound of sugar and ½ cup of brandy to each pint of juice.

  4. Cut the lemon peel into small pieces and add them to the juice.

Steep and bottle

  1. Cover and let it stand for 24 hours.

  2. Strain and bottle the mixture.

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

Lemons
Provide the juice and the peel, which supplies aromatic oil and sharp acidity.
Sugar
Balances the sharp acidity of the lemon juice and adds sweetness.
Brandy
Acts as a preservative and carries the lemon aroma.

The step that matters

Cutting the peel into small pieces before steeping. The peel holds aromatic oils that release into the juice during the 24-hour rest. Pieces that are too large extract flavor unevenly, and the rind must be pared thinly so that bitter white pith does not flavor the shrub.

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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