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Drink

Citric Lemonade

Citric lemonade is a citrus drink made with citric acid crystals, sugar, boiling water, and lemon essence.

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

Citric Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the concentrate

  1. In a basin, combine citric acid and loaf sugar.

  2. Pour boiling water over the mixture and stir well.

  3. Once cooled, add the essence of lemon.

  4. Transfer the mixture into a bottle with a glass stopper or cork.

Serve

  1. To serve, mix 1 tablespoon of lemonade with half a tumbler of cold water.

  2. For sparkling lemonade, add 2 tablespoons of lemonade to a tumbler and fill with soda 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. 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

Citric acid
Provides the sharp, sour taste that makes the drink taste like lemonade.
Loaf sugar
Balances the acidity with sweetness and dissolves into the syrup.
Essence of lemon
Adds concentrated lemon aroma and flavour.

“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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