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Drink

Lemon or Lime Water Ice

A frozen beverage made from lime or lemon juice, orange juice, water, syrup, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lime and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 937 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Lemon or Lime Water Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Rasp 3 or 4 limes on a lump of sugar and scrape it into a mixing vessel.

  2. Squeeze the limes and add the juice of 2 oranges.

  3. Add 1 quart of water and ½ pint of syrup.

Freeze

  1. Freeze the mixture.

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. Lime + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together937 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  4. Orange + syruptop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,179 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Lime + syruptop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together322 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Limes
Provide the main acidity and the aromatic oils from the zest.
Oranges
Add juice and sweetness that softens the sharpness of the lime.
Syrup
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice softer.
Sugar
Sweetens the zest and helps draw out its aromatic oils.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, syrup, 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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