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Drink

Lemonade, Bottled

A preserved lemonade made with sugar, water, lemon essence, acids, and soda, bottled for later use.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Lemonade, Bottled

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve the sugar in water and boil over low heat.

  2. Once cooled, add acetic acid, tartaric acid, and essence of lemon.

Bottle and seal

  1. Pour one-sixth of the mixture into each bottle filled with water.

  2. Add carbonate of soda to each bottle and cork immediately.

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 body to balance the sharp acids.
Acetic acid
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the flavour.
Tartaric acid
Adds tartness and reacts with carbonate of soda to produce fizz.
Carbonate of soda
Reacts with the acids to release carbon dioxide, creating fizz.
Essence of lemon
Supplies the lemon aroma and flavour.

The step that matters

Add carbonate of soda and cork immediately. Carbonate of soda reacts with the acids to release carbon dioxide gas. Corking right away traps the gas in the bottle so it stays dissolved and carbonates the drink instead of escaping.

“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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