Name: Lemon Sauce
Ingredients: 2 lemons; ½ pint water; ½ lb brown sugar

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 ↓

Lemon Sauce

Ingredients

2 lemons
½ pint water
½ lb brown sugar

Directions

Prepare

Juice the lemons and set the juice aside.
In a saucepan, combine the water and brown sugar.

Cook and finish

Boil the mixture for 16 minutes.
Add the lemon juice and rind to the saucepan.
Boil for an additional 5 minutes and then strain the sauce.
Finely shred a small amount of the cooked lemon rind and add it to the sauce.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

Brown sugar: Provides sweetness and a richer, caramel-like flavor as it dissolves and boils.
Lemons: Juice supplies sharp acidity, and the rind adds fragrant citrus oil.

“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.