Name: Lime Juice Drink
Ingredients: Fresh limes; loaf sugar; a little liqueur; iced water

Why it works: Lime and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,332 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Lime Juice Drink

Ingredients

Fresh limes
loaf sugar
a little liqueur
iced water

Directions

Make the limeade

Squeeze the juice from the fresh limes and strain it.
Add sugar and liqueur to taste.
Pour a little of this mixture into a glass and fill it with iced water.

Garnish

Optionally, add slices of fresh fruit like pineapple or apricot for extra 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.

Lime + sugartop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,332 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fresh limes: Provide the main tart citrus juice that gives the drink its flavor.
Loaf sugar: Balances the lime's acidity with sweetness.
Liqueur: Adds aromatic flavor to the drink.

“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.