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Water Ices

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Water Ices

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Water Ices

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the juice of your chosen fruit with water and sweeten it.

  2. If using jam, rub it through a sieve, then add thick boiled syrup and lemon juice.

  3. Optionally, add coloring and beaten egg white before freezing.

  4. For currants, sieve them, then mix with 4 ounces of powdered sugar and 1 pint of water.

  5. Strain the mixture and freeze.

  6. For orange ice, cut oranges in half and press out the juice.

  7. Take the pulp from the rind, pour a little boiling water on it, stir, and sieve.

  8. Combine this pulp with the orange juice and enough sugar to create a rich syrup.

  9. If the oranges are good, add some sugar from the peel to extract more juice.

  10. Lemons can be prepared in the same way, adding the beaten egg white.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Currant + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

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

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

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

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against syrup, lemon, egg, sugar, orange. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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