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Drink

Lemon Egg-nog

A chilled beverage made from egg yolk, lemon juice, sugar, and whipped egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Lemon Egg-nog

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Separate the white from the yolk of the egg.

  2. Add cold water, lemon juice, and sugar to the yolk; beat thoroughly.

  3. Whip the egg white with a few grains of salt until stiff.

  4. Gently mix the whipped egg white with the yolk mixture until fully incorporated.

Serve

  1. Heap the mixture in a glass and serve with a spoon.

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

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

  2. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Egg
Yolk enriches and thickens the drink; whipped white adds lightness and a foamy structure.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and balances the richness of the yolk.
White sugar
Sweetens the drink and helps stabilise the beaten mixture.

The step that matters

Whipping the egg white until stiff. Egg white must be beaten until it forms firm peaks, as its proteins trap air and create the foam that gives the drink its light texture. Under-whipped white will collapse when folded in.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar. 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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