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Lemon Shrub

A preserved lemon liqueur made with lemon rind, sugar, and French brandy.

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

Lemon Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Peel the rind off the lemons thinly.

  2. Squeeze out the juice.

  3. Strain the juice.

  4. In a bowl, combine the lemon juice with the sugar, stirring until the sugar is dissolved.

  5. Add 12 tablespoons of French brandy to the syrup.

Steep

  1. Soak the lemon rind in the syrup.

  2. Let the mixture sit for a day.

  3. Stir the mixture frequently.

  4. Strain the syrup.

  5. Mix the strained syrup with the brandy and lemon rinds.

Bottle and store

  1. Pour the mixture into clean bottles.

  2. Cork the bottles tightly.

  3. Seal the bottles.

  4. Store the bottles in dry sand in a cool place.

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.

  1. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + brandytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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 juice and rind that give the shrub its bright, sharp citrus flavour and aroma.
White sugar
Sweetens the lemon juice and balances its acidity, forming a syrup.
French brandy
Acts as a preservative and carries the aroma of the lemon rind into the finished shrub.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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