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Drink

Fruit Nectar

A sweet liquid made by steeping lemon rind, raisins, and sugar in boiling water, then adding lemon juice and filtering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,481 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Fruit Nectar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Remove the rind from the lemons and place it in an earthenware jar.

  2. Add the chopped raisins and sugar to the jar.

  3. Pour the boiling water over the ingredients and let it cool.

  4. Once cool, add the strained juice of the lemons.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Leave the mixture in a cool place for a week, stirring daily.

  2. Strain through a jelly bag until clear and bottle.

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. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Lemon + raisintop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. 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 acidity and aroma from the rind and juice.
Raisins
Add sweetness and body, and feed the fermentation along with the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the drink and provides fuel for fermentation.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture cool before adding the lemon juice. Lemon juice added to water that is still very hot can lose its fresh flavour, and the heat would also harm the yeasts and bacteria that drive fermentation during the week of standing.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, sugar. 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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