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A Wholesome Spring Drink

A chilled beverage made from boiled rhubarb, sweetened and optionally mixed with barley or rice water and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rhubarb and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 546 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

A Wholesome Spring Drink

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the rhubarb into small pieces.

  2. Put the rhubarb into a large saucepan with the cold water.

Make the tea

  1. Boil gently until the rhubarb is soft.

  2. Strain the mixture and pour the liquid into a large jug.

  3. Sweeten the liquid to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve cold.

  2. Optionally mix with barley water or rice water and add a squeeze of lemon for flavor.

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. Rhubarb + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together546 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  2. Rhubarb + barleytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  3. Barley + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together484 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  5. Rhubarb + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,852 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Rhubarb
Provides the tart flavour and pink colour that the tea is built on.
Sugar
Sweetens the tea and balances the sharp acidity of the rhubarb.

The step that matters

Boil gently until the rhubarb is soft. Gentle heat extracts flavour and colour from the rhubarb without breaking it down into a cloudy, bitter liquid. A hard boil can break the stalks apart and make the tea harsher.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rhubarb, sugar, barley):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rhubarb, sugar, barley. 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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