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Drink

Irish Moss Lemonade

A chilled beverage made from boiled Irish moss, lemon juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the moss

  1. Soak the Irish moss in cold water for a few hours.

  2. Boil the soaked moss in 4 cups of boiling water for about 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture to remove the moss.

Sweeten and chill

  1. Add the lemon juice and sugar, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

  2. Chill before serving.

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. Irish moss + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together61 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. 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
Provides thickening and body as its natural gums release into the hot water.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that gives the lemonade its bright, sharp flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the lemon juice.

The step that matters

Strain the mixture to remove the moss. Irish moss releases gums into the hot water as it boils. Leftover pieces of moss left in the liquid can make the lemonade slimy or gritty, so the strain should remove them fully.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Peachfits less well
  4. Raisinfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against irish moss, 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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