Name: Lemon Water Ice
Ingredients: 4 lemons; 1½ pints water; ½ lb sugar; ice; salt

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 juice

Rub the lemon rinds with the lump sugar to extract the zest.
Cut the lemons in half and press out the juice, then strain it.
Add enough water to the lemon juice to make 1½ pints total.

Cook and freeze

Boil the mixture with the sugar for five minutes.
Pour it into a large basin to cool.
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.

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 for sharp acidity and the rinds for aromatic lemon oils.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the lemon's acidity while keeping the ice softer when frozen.

“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.