Name: Portable Lemonade
Ingredients: 4 large lemons; 1 pound white sugar; Grated lemon rinds; Water

Why it works: Lemon and sugar 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 ↓

Portable Lemonade

Ingredients

4 large lemons
1 pound white sugar
Grated lemon rinds
Water

Directions

Make the syrup base

Strain the juice from the lemons into a bowl.
Add the white sugar to the lemon juice, mixing until it dissolves completely.
Grate the rinds of the lemons and add them to the mixture.

Store and serve

Transfer the mixture to a jar or large-mouthed bottle for storage.
To serve, use 2 tablespoons of the mixture for each tumbler of water.

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.

Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

Lemons: Provide the juice that gives the drink its tart, acidic flavour.
White sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the lemon juice.
Lemon rinds: Add aromatic oils from the peel, giving extra lemon fragrance and flavour.

“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.