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Drink

Strawberry Acid

A tart strawberry beverage made by steeping fruit, adding citric acid, sugar, and lemon juice, then bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Strawberry Acid

Ingredients

Directions

Make the juice

  1. Combine strawberries and water in a bowl and add citric acid.

  2. Let it stand for 3 hours.

  3. Strain the mixture through a cloth and pour over 2 more quarts of strawberries.

  4. Let it stand for another 3 hours, then strain again.

Sweeten and bottle

  1. For every pint of juice, add ¾ pound of white sugar.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Skim off any foam.

  4. Let it cool.

  5. Pour the cooled mixture into bottles and seal.

Serve

  1. To serve as a drink, add a little lemon juice and crushed ice.

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. 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

Strawberries
Provide the main flavour and the juice that forms the drink.
Citric acid
Adds sharp tartness that gives the drink its acidic character.
White sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the citric acid.

The step that matters

Bring the sweetened juice to a boil and skim the foam. Boiling dissolves the sugar fully into the juice so the drink tastes evenly sweet. Skimming removes the foam that rises from the fruit, leaving a clearer, cleaner liquid before bottling.

“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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