Name: An Excellent Method of Making Punch
Ingredients: 2 large fresh lemons; large lumps of double-refined sugar; boiling water

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 ↓

An Excellent Method of Making Punch

Ingredients

2 large fresh lemons
large lumps of double-refined sugar
boiling water

Directions

Rub the sugar over the lemons to absorb the yellow parts of the skins.
Put the sugar into a bowl and add more sugar as needed based on the lemon juice.
Squeeze the lemon juice onto the sugar and mix well using a bruiser.
Mix the mixture with boiling water until it cools to your taste.

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.

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 the oils from the skin that give the drink its sharp, aromatic flavour.
Double-refined sugar: Sweetens the drink and balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.

“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.