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Lemon Water Ice

A chilled lemon beverage made by freezing lemon juice, sugar, and water with ice and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Lemon Water Ice

Why it works: Lemon and sugar 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 ↓

Lemon Water Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Rub the rind of the lemons with the sugar to extract the flavor.

  2. Cut the lemons in half and press out the juice, then strain it.

Make the syrup

  1. Add enough water to the lemon juice to make 1 quart total.

  2. Boil the mixture with the sugar for five minutes.

  3. Pour it into a large basin to cool.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture using ice and salt as per your freezer's instructions.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

Lemons
Provide the juice and aromatic oils from the rind, giving the drink its sour and fragrant flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart lemon juice and, rubbed into the rind, draws out its flavor oils.
Water
Dilutes the lemon juice to a drinkable strength and adds the liquid that freezes into ice.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture with the sugar for five minutes. Boiling dissolves the sugar fully into the liquid so it sweetens evenly and does not gritty or settle out as the mixture cools and freezes.

“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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