Skip to main content
Drink

Prune or Tamarind Drink

A chilled beverage made by simmering prunes or tamarinds in boiling water with sugar, then adding lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tamarind and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 170 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Prune or Tamarind Drink

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash, stone, and slice the prunes or tamarinds.

  2. Put them into a saucepan with the boiling water and sugar.

  3. Simmer gently for one hour.

  4. Add the lemon juice.

  5. Strain the mixture.

  6. Cover and let it cool until cold.

  7. Optionally, add half a glass of sherry or port.

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. Tamarind + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together170 recipes

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

  2. Tamarind + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together362 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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

Prunes or tamarinds
Provide the main fruit flavour, sweetness and body to the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the drink.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Mangofits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tamarind, 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.

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesTamarind MilkTamarind Milk12 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipes