Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓
Quick Lemonade
Ingredients
Directions
Make the syrup
Melt the sugar with enough water to prevent burning and boil until it spins a thread.
Infuse and finish
Add the lemon juice and thin rind to the mixture and heat thoroughly without boiling.
Strain the mixture.
Let it cool before bottling.
Use 1 tablespoon of the mixture for each tumbler of lemonade.
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.
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Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together53,532 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Sugar and lemon 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
- Provides sweetness and, when boiled, forms the base syrup that balances the lemon's sourness.
- Lemon juice
- Supplies the sour acidity that defines the drink and brightens the sweet syrup.
- Lemon rind
- Adds aromatic oils from the peel, giving the mixture a stronger lemon fragrance.
The step that matters
Heating without boiling after adding the lemon juice. Boiling after the juice goes in can drive off the fresh lemon aroma and dull the flavour, so the mixture should only be heated thoroughly, not brought to a boil.
“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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