Name: Lemonade
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon lemon juice; 2 tablespoons syrup; ½ cup water

Why it works: Lemon and syrup are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,235 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Lemonade

Ingredients

1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 tablespoons syrup
½ cup water

Directions

Make the syrup

Make a syrup by boiling 1 cup water and ½ cup sugar for 8 minutes.

Assemble the lemonade

To 2 tablespoons of syrup, add 1 tablespoon lemon juice and ½ cup water.
You can also use soda water, Apollinaris, or Seltzer water.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + syruptop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,235 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lemon juice: Supplies the sour acidity and bright citrus aroma that define the drink.
Syrup: Adds sweetness that balances the lemon juice's tartness and dissolves easily into the cold drink.

“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.