Name: Hot Lemonade
Ingredients: 1 lemon; 1 pint boiling water; 1 tablespoon sugar

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 ↓

Hot Lemonade

Ingredients

1 lemon
1 pint boiling water
1 tablespoon sugar

Directions

Infuse the rind

Pare a few thin bits of rind from the lemon.
Place the rind in a pitcher.
Pour 1 pint of boiling water over the lemon rind.
Cover the pitcher.
Let it stand for a few moments.

Make the sweet lemon juice

In another vessel, pour enough boiling water over 1 tablespoon of sugar to dissolve it.
Cut the lemon in half.
Extract the juice.
Add the juice to the dissolved sugar.

Combine and serve

Remove the lemon peel from the water.
Stir in the lemon juice and sugar mixture.
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.

Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

Lemon: Its rind flavours the hot water with aroma, and its juice adds sourness that balances the sugar.
Sugar: Adds sweetness that balances the lemon's acidity.

“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.