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Drink

Fob Lemonade

A lemon infusion beverage made with sugar syrup, lemon juice, and lemon peel steeped in hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fob Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water for 12 minutes to make syrup, then add lemon juice.

  2. Cool.

  3. Dilute with ice water to taste.

Make the infusion

  1. Place lemon peel and cloves in a bottle with hot water.

  2. Put the bottle in a bain-marie or stewpan with boiling water for 1-2 hours without boiling.

  3. Remove the bottle and let it cool.

Combine

  1. Mix fresh lemon juice, sugar, and the infusion of the rind.

  2. Stir well.

  3. Add cold water.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Clove + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

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

Sugar
Dissolves into the syrup to sweeten the drink and give it body.
Lemon juice
Supplies the sharp acidity that defines the lemonade's flavour.
Lemons
Their peel is steeped to release aromatic oils into the drink.
Cloves
Add warm, spicy aroma during the infusion.

The step that matters

Infuse without boiling. Gentle, sub-boiling heat draws aromatic oils from the lemon peel into the water. Boiling can pull out bitter compounds from the pith and drive off the delicate citrus aromas.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Peppermintfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, orange. 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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