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Excellent Portable Lemonade

A simple lemonade made by mixing grated lemon rind, sugar, and lemon juice, then storing the mixture for later use.

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 lemon sugar

  1. Grate the rind of the lemon and mix it with the sugar.

  2. Reduce the mixture to a powder.

  3. Pour the strained lemon juice over the sugar mixture.

  4. Press the mixture into a jar for storage.

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, once ground with the rind, helps draw out and carry lemon oils.
Lemon juice
Supplies the sourness and fresh lemon flavor that define the drink.
Lemon rind
Its oils add a strong lemon aroma that juice alone does not provide.
Citric acid
Adds extra sourness to balance sweetness when the drink tastes too sweet.

“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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