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Lemonade, Nourishing, for Fever Patients

A soothing lemonade made with arrowroot, lemon juice, sugar, and boiling water for fever patients.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lemonade, Nourishing, for Fever Patients

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Rub the arrowroot with a little cold water in a bowl or pitcher that holds about 1 quart.

  2. Squeeze in the juice of half a lemon.

  3. Add the white sugar.

  4. Pour in boiling water to fill the dish, stirring constantly.

  5. Cover the dish and let it cool 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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 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. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a light, smooth body as it heats in the boiling water.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sugar.
White sugar
Adds sweetness that offsets the lemon's sourness.

The step that matters

Pour in boiling water while stirring constantly. Arrowroot starch must be stirred into the hot liquid as it heats so it gels evenly. If the water is added without constant stirring, the starch can clump into lumps that do not dissolve smoothly.

“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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