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Drink

Portable Lemonade

A sweetened lemon drink made by extracting juice, boiling pulp, and mixing with sugar and water.

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 ↓

Portable Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Roll the lemons on the table to release more juice, then press the juice into a bowl, avoiding the tin.

  2. Strain out all the seeds from the juice.

  3. Remove the pulp from the lemon peels and boil it in 1 pint of water for a few minutes to remove the acid.

Make the syrup

  1. Strain the boiled water and mix it with the lemon juice.

  2. Add 1 pound of white sugar to the mixture and boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Bottle the syrup and store it.

Serve

  1. To serve, mix 1 to 2 teaspoons of syrup with a glass of water.

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).

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, acidity and aroma that give the lemonade its flavour.
Water
Carries flavour out of the peel and pulp during the boil, then mixes into the juice.
White sugar
Sweetens the drink and, boiled into a syrup, makes a stable concentrate for storage.

“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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