Name: Sterilized Lemonade
Ingredients: 1 lemon; ¼ of the lemon rind; 4 lumps of loaf sugar; 1 pint of boiling water

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 ↓

Sterilized Lemonade

Ingredients

1 lemon
¼ of the lemon rind
4 lumps of loaf sugar
1 pint of boiling water

Directions

Squeeze the juice from the lemon and strain it.
Combine the lemon juice, lemon rind, and sugar in a pitcher.
Pour the boiling water over the mixture.
Cover the pitcher and let it stand for 2 hours.
Strain the lemonade before serving.

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.

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

Lemon: Provides the juice and rind that give the drink its sharp, aromatic flavour.
Loaf sugar: Sweetens the drink and balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.

“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.