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To Make Excellent Lemonade

A citrus beverage made with spring water, lime juice, sugar, lemon peel, sulphur essence, lemon slices, and rose water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lime and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,289 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Make Excellent Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a large pitcher, combine 3 quarts of spring water with 1 pint of lime juice.

  2. Add 1 pound of double refined sugar and stir until dissolved.

  3. For a variation, scrape lemon peel into the mixture.

  4. Add a few drops of essence of sulphur and slices of lemon.

  5. Finish by adding a little rose water for flavor.

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. Lime + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lemon + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Lime + rosetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together53 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  5. Sugar + rosetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,584 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Lime juice
Provides the sharp acidity that defines the drink's tart flavor.
Double refined sugar
Dissolves into the water to balance the sourness with sweetness.
Spring water
Forms the liquid base that carries and dilutes the other flavors.

The step that matters

Stir the sugar until fully dissolved. Undissolved sugar sinks and makes the drink unevenly sweet. Stirring until clear gives a uniformly balanced sweetness throughout the pitcher.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, rose):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, rose. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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