Skip to main content
Drink

Strawberry Delight

A chilled strawberry beverage flavored with orange and lemon juice, sweetened with sugar and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Strawberry Delight

Ingredients

Directions

Make the lemonade

  1. Mash the strawberries in a bowl.

  2. Add the orange juice, lemon juice, sugar, and water. Stir well.

  3. Let the mixture stand on ice for 2 hours.

  4. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve, then through a jelly bag.

Serve

  1. Pour into tall glasses.

  2. Add 3 sliced strawberries to each glass.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Strawberries
Provide the main flavour and colour, and their pulp gives the drink body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sourness of the citrus juices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright, sharp flavour.
Orange juice
Adds sweetness and citrus aroma alongside the lemon.

The step that matters

Straining through a fine sieve and jelly bag. Straining removes the fine strawberry pulp and solids, leaving a clear, smooth lemonade. Skipping or rushing this step leaves the drink cloudy and gritty.

“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.

You might also like

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipes