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Lemonade, to Be Made the Day Before Wanted

A chilled lemonade made by steeping lemon rinds, squeezing juice, adding sugar and boiling hot milk, then straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemonade, to Be Made the Day Before Wanted

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare lemons thinly and place 8 rinds into a bowl with 3 quarts hot water.

  2. Cover and let steep for 3-4 hours.

Make the lemonade

  1. Rub fine sugar on lemons to attract the essence, then squeeze juice into a china bowl.

  2. Add 1½ pounds fine sugar to the lemon juice.

  3. Pour in 3 quarts boiling hot milk, mix well, and strain through a jelly bag until clear.

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 + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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 sour acidity and the aromatic oils from the rind.
Fine sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sharp acidity of the lemon juice.
Milk
Its proteins curdle in the acidic juice and trap cloudy particles, so straining leaves the drink clear.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling hot milk. The acid in the lemon juice makes the milk curdle into solid curds that carry cloudy particles. Mixing well lets the curds form evenly, and straining through a jelly bag removes them, leaving a clear liquid.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk. 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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