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Drink

Cream Nectar

A sweetened, lemon-flavored beverage made with sugar, water, egg white, tartaric acid, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Cream Nectar

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve the sugar in the water.

  2. Boil the mixture down to 2 quarts.

  3. Add the egg white while boiling.

  4. Strain the mixture.

Flavour and bottle

  1. Add tartaric acid when cold.

  2. Add lemon juice to taste.

  3. Bottle and cork the mixture.

  4. Shake 2-3 times a day.

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).

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Crushed sugar
Provides the sweetness and the bulk of the syrup once dissolved in water.
Egg white
Its proteins coagulate when boiled, carrying impurities up to the surface so they can be strained off, clarifying the syrup.
Tartaric acid
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the syrup.

The step that matters

Add the egg white while boiling. The egg white must be added while the mixture is boiling so its proteins can coagulate and trap impurities, which are then removed when the mixture is strained. Adding it at the wrong time leaves the syrup cloudy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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