Name: Fruit Punch
Ingredients: 12 lemons; 2 pounds sugar; 6 quarts water; Fruit juice of your choice

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 ↓

Fruit Punch

Ingredients

12 lemons
2 pounds sugar
6 quarts water
Fruit juice of your choice

Directions

Dissolve 2 pounds of sugar in 6 quarts of water.
Juice the 12 lemons and add the juice to the sugar water.
Add any kind of fruit juice until you reach your desired strength.

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.

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

Sugar: Dissolves into the water to sweeten the punch and balance the lemon's acidity.
Lemons: Provide the main acidity and bright citrus aroma that give the punch its tang.
Fruit juice: Adds extra fruit flavor and body, adjusted to the desired strength.

“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.