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To Preserve Lemon Juice

A method for preserving lemon juice by dissolving sugar and storing in a sealed container.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 ↓

To Preserve Lemon Juice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Squeeze and strain the lemon juice into a bowl.

  2. Add the finely pounded and sifted sugar to the lemon juice.

  3. Stir with a silver spoon until the sugar is completely dissolved.

Bottle and store

  1. Bottle the mixture and cork it tightly.

  2. Seal the cork or tie a bladder over it, and store in a dry, cool place.

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 + 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

Lemon juice
Provides the sour, acidic flavour that defines the finished preserve.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, at high concentration, helps preserve the juice by binding its water.

The step that matters

Stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Undissolved sugar can settle or crystallise at the bottom of the bottle, leaving a grainy texture and uneven sweetness. Fine, sifted sugar dissolves more readily in acidic juice when stirred thoroughly.

“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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