Name: Lemon Mead
Ingredients: 8 gallons of water; 8 lbs white sugar; 1 pint good yeast; lemon oil to taste

Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓

Lemon Mead

Ingredients

8 gallons of water
8 lbs white sugar
1 pint good yeast
lemon oil to taste

Directions

Mix the water, sugar, and yeast together.
Flavor with lemon oil to suit your taste.
Pour the mixture into a jug.
Let it stand for 12 hours.
Keep it overnight before using.

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.

Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon 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

White sugar: Provides the fermentable sugar that the yeast converts into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Yeast: Ferments the sugar, producing the alcohol and carbonation that define the mead.
Lemon oil: Adds the lemon aroma and flavor that give the mead its character.

“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.