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Drink

Excellent Portable Lemonade

A concentrated lemonade made from lemon rind, sugar, and juice, dissolved in water for a portable drink.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓

Excellent Portable Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Grate the rind of a very fine juicy lemon and mix it with ¼ pound of sugar.

  2. Reduce the mixture to a powder and pour in the strained juice of the lemon.

  3. Press the mixture into a jar and store it.

Serve

  1. To serve, dissolve 1 tablespoon of the mixture in a glass of water.

  2. If too sweet, add a small amount of citric acid to 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.

  1. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Sugar
Provides sweetness and bulk, and helps draw oils from the lemon rind into the mixture.
Lemon juice
Supplies the sour, acidic flavour that balances the sweetness.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic lemon oils that give the drink its fragrance.

The step that matters

Reduce the mixture to a powder. The sugar must be ground fine enough to dissolve quickly in water later. Coarse crystals leave gritty sweetness, and the rind oils are better released when the sugar is finely broken up.

“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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