Name: Lemonade. Lemonade
Ingredients: 1 large lemon or 2 small lemons; 3 to 4 tablespoons sugar; 4 glasses water; cracked ice; lemon slices for garnish

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 ↓

Lemonade. Lemonade

4 glasses

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

Grate the yellow rind from the lemons and roll them until soft.
Peel off the bitter white rind, cut the lemons in half, and squeeze the juice into a pitcher.
Add the grated rind and pulp to the pitcher with the juice.

Make and serve

Stir in the sugar and pour in the water.
Stir well and add cracked ice or chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
Strain before serving and garnish each glass with a slice of lemon.

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

Lemons: Provide the main flavour, with juice for acidity and grated rind for aroma.
Sugar: Sweetens the drink and balances the lemon's sourness.
Water: Dilutes the juice to a drinkable volume.

“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.