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Drink

Lemonade

A citrus drink made from lemons, sugar, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Lemonade

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 ↓

Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Boil a kettle of water.

  2. Wash the lemons and peel them thinly, avoiding the white pith.

  3. Remove all the pith from the lemons.

  4. Slice the lemons thinly, remove the seeds, and place the slices and half the rind in a jug.

Make the lemonade

  1. Add sugar to taste, about ⅓ cup.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the lemons in the jug.

  3. Cover the jug and let it cool.

  4. Once cold, strain the lemonade into another jug and serve.

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 + 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 the sour citrus flavour and aromatic oils from the peel and juice.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sharpness of the lemons.
Boiling water
Extracts flavour from the lemon slices and rind as it steeps.

“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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