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 ↓
Powder, Lemonade
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the powder
Dry each powder separately.
Mix the dried powders together.
Add the oil of lemon and triturate well with the powders.
Use
Use 1 tablespoon of the mixture for each tumbler of water.
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.
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Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- White sugar
- Provides sweetness to balance the sourness of the acid.
- Tartaric acid
- Provides sourness and reacts with bicarbonate of soda to release gas for fizz.
- Bicarbonate of soda
- Reacts with the tartaric acid when dissolved in water, producing carbon dioxide bubbles.
- Oil of lemon
- Supplies the lemon aroma and flavour.
The step that matters
Triturate the oil of lemon well with the powders. Oil of lemon does not dissolve in water or mix evenly by itself. Grinding it thoroughly into the dry powder spreads it through the mixture, so each spoonful and glass tastes evenly of lemon instead of patchy or greasy.
“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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