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Drink

Tea a LA Russe

A tea served with lemon slices and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and tea work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 610 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Tea a LA Russe

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and slice fresh lemons.

  2. Place a slice in the bottom of each cup.

  3. Sprinkle with white sugar.

Serve

  1. Pour hot, strong tea over the lemon slice.

  2. Serve lemon slices with the peel on.

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 + teatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Sugar + teatop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,204 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

Fresh lemons
Adds bright acidity and aroma that cut through the tea's bitterness.
White sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sourness of the lemon.
Hot strong tea
Provides the main liquid and the tannic, bitter base flavour of the drink.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Orangefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, tea. 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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