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Peach Water Ice

A chilled peach beverage made with peaches, lemon juice, water, sugar, and peach kernels.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Peach Water Ice

Why it works: Peach and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Peach Water Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar in water with the pounded peach kernels.

Strain and freeze

  1. Once cooled, add the peaches and press the mixture through a sieve.

  2. Stir in the lemon juice.

  3. Freeze the mixture until solid.

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. Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

  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

Peaches
Provide the main fruit flavor and body of the mixture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice softer.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the peach flavor.
Peach kernels
Contribute a subtle almond-like aroma when steeped in the syrup.

The step that matters

Freezing until solid. Freezing only lets ice crystals form slowly if the mixture is stirred or scraped during freezing. Freezing it completely still can leave a hard, coarse texture, because sugar lowers the freezing point and the fruit solids interrupt crystal growth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, 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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