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Drink

Lime Water

A clear beverage made by steeping a fresh lime in hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Walnut and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 115 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Lime Water

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pour hot water over the unslacked lime.

  2. Stir until the lime is slacked.

  3. Let the mixture stand until clear, then bottle it.

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. Walnut + limetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together115 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

Unslacked lime
Calcium hydroxide forms as it slakes, dissolving to make the clear alkaline solution that defines lime water.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand until clear. Undissolved lime particles and calcium carbonate settle slowly, so the liquid must rest long enough to clear before it is poured off. Pouring too early leaves cloudy water with sediment, which weakens the clear solution.

“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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