Name: Irish Moss Lemonade
Ingredients: 1 cup Irish moss; 2 cups boiling water; 1 lemon, juiced; 2 tablespoons sugar

Why it works: Irish moss and lemon work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 61 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Irish Moss Lemonade

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

1 cup Irish moss
2 cups boiling water
1 lemon, juiced
2 tablespoons sugar

Directions

Soak the Irish moss in cold water, then wash it.
Add the boiling water and cook for 10 to 15 minutes.
Stir in the lemon juice and sugar.
Serve hot.

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.

Irish moss + lemontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together61 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Irish moss + sugartop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together107 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Irish moss: Its natural gelling compounds thicken the liquid to give the lemonade a body.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Sugar: Adds sweetness that offsets the lemon's sourness.