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Milk Lemonade to Keep a Day or Two

A chilled beverage made by infusing lemon rinds in hot water, sweetening with sugar, and mixing with boiling milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Milk Lemonade to Keep a Day or Two

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavourings

  1. Pare the lemons as thin as possible.

  2. Put 8 of the rinds into 3 quarts of hot water and let it stand for 3 hours.

  3. Rub fine sugar on the rinds of the remaining lemons to absorb the essence.

Make the lemonade

  1. Place the sugared rinds in a bowl and squeeze the juice from the lemons over them.

  2. Add 1.5 pounds of fine sugar to the bowl.

  3. Combine the infused water with the mixture and add 3 quarts of boiling milk.

  4. Mix well and strain through a jelly bag.

  5. Refrigerate and use the day after making.

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. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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

Lemons
Supply the sharp acidity and the aromatic oils from the rinds and juice.
Milk
Its proteins curdle when they meet the acid, and straining removes them to leave a clearer drink.
Fine sugar
Sweetens the drink and balances the sharp acidity of the lemon juice.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling milk to the lemon mixture. The acid in the lemon juice makes the milk proteins clump into curds. Those curds carry cloudiness and fine particles with them, so the drink clears when it is strained through the jelly bag.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk. 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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