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Lemonade From Preserved Lemon Juice

A lemonade made by mixing preserved lemon juice with water, sweetened with sugar, and flavored with a touch of salad oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓

Lemonade From Preserved Lemon Juice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Combine 1 pound of refined sugar with 1 pint of lemon juice, stirring until dissolved.

  2. Bottle the mixture and add 1 teaspoon of salad oil on top to keep out air, then cork tightly.

Serve

  1. When ready to use, remove the oil with a bit of cotton.

  2. Add enough preserved lemon juice to a goblet of water to suit your taste.

  3. For hot lemonade, use hot water instead of cold.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon 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

Refined sugar
Sweetens the juice and balances its acidity, and as a dense syrup it helps preserve the mixture.
Lemon juice
Provides the sour, bright flavor that makes up the lemonade and acts as the preserving base.
Salad oil
Forms a thin layer on top of the mixture that keeps air away from it during storage.

The step that matters

Adding the salad oil layer before corking. The oil floats on the surface and blocks air contact with the juice, which slows spoilage. Skipping it or corking loosely leaves the mixture more exposed to air and microbes.

“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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