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Drink

Lemonade

A citrus drink made by boiling lemon peel and sugar, then adding lemon juice, water, blood orange pulp, sugared pineapple, and serving over crushed ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Lemonade

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Lemonade

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Grate the peel of the lemons into a cup of water.

  2. Add the sugar and boil the mixture for 10 minutes to create a syrup.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the lemon juice and pulp, removing all seeds, to the syrup.

  2. Mix in 3 large cups of water and beat thoroughly.

  3. Add diced pulp of a blood orange and sugared pineapple.

  4. Chill and serve in glasses filled with crushed ice.

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.

  1. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Lemon + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Sugar + pineappletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 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
Juice supplies sourness and peel supplies aromatic oils for fragrance.
Sugar
Sweetens the drink and, boiled with water, forms the syrup that balances the acidity.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, orange. 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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