Skip to main content
Drink

Egg Lemonade

A chilled drink made with lemon, sugar, ice, a raw egg, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Egg Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a glass, combine half of a large lemon and three lumps of sugar.

  2. Press and work the mixture with a small wooden pestle until the juice is extracted and the skin is soft.

Mix and serve

  1. Add two tablespoons of sugar, two tablespoons of finely cracked ice, and one raw egg.

  2. Fill the glass nearly full with cold water.

  3. Invert a tin shaker over the glass and shake well.

  4. Serve with two straws.

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. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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 juice supplies the sharp acidity that balances the sweetness.
Raw egg
Its proteins foam and emulsify when shaken, giving the drink body and a creamy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the drink and helps dissolve the lemon juice and ice.

The step that matters

Shaking with the egg. The shake must be vigorous enough to break up the egg and blend it with the cold liquid. Insufficient shaking leaves streaks of raw egg and an uneven, frothy texture.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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.

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes