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Drink

Spiced Lemonade

A chilled lemonade flavored with lemon rind, cloves, cinnamon, and lemon juice, served over ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar, water, lemon rind, cloves, and cinnamon.

  2. Cook for 5 minutes, then cool the mixture.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the juice of 3 lemons.

  2. Dilute with additional water and serve over cracked ice.

  3. Garnish with sprigs of mint if desired.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Lemon + minttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,998 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Clove + minttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together576 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the drink and dissolves into the warm water to form a syrup.
Lemon juice
Provides the sour, acidic flavour that balances the sweet syrup.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic lemon oils to the syrup while it heats.
Cinnamon stick
Infuses warm, woody aroma into the syrup as it cooks.
Cloves
Infuse a warm, pungent spice aroma into the syrup.

The step that matters

Cool the syrup before adding the lemon juice. Heating lemon juice can dull its fresh aroma and bright flavour, so it is added after the spiced syrup has cooled.

Swap the mint

The recipe marks mint as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, clove, cinnamon. 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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