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Drink

Pomegranate Drink

A sweet and tart drink made from pomegranate seeds, sugar, lime juice, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pomegranate and lime share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 90 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Pomegranate Drink

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the seeds from the pomegranates and place them in a bowl.

  2. Add the powdered sugar and bruise the seeds.

  3. Pour the water over the mixture, then add the lime juice.

  4. Strain the mixture twice through a fine cloth.

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. Pomegranate + limetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together90 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Pomegranate + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together210 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + limetop 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

Pomegranates
Provide the main juice and the tart, fruity flavour of the drink.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps draw liquid out of the bruised seeds.
Limes
Add acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Bruise the seeds with the sugar. Bruising breaks the seed sacs so they release their juice. Too little bruising yields less juice, while over-crushing can release bitter notes from the seeds and pith.

Swap the lime

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pomegranate, sugar. 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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