Name: Portable Lemonade
Ingredients: 4 large lemons; 1 pound white sugar; Grated rind of 4 lemons; Water

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 ↓

Portable Lemonade

Ingredients

4 large lemons
1 pound white sugar
Grated rind of 4 lemons
Water

Directions

Make the syrup

Strain the juice from the lemons.
Mix the lemon juice with the white sugar until it dissolves.
Grate the rinds of the lemons and add them to the mixture.

Store and serve

Preserve the mixture in a closed jar or large-mouthed bottles.
To serve, use 1 tablespoon of the mixture for each tumbler of 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.

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 juice and acidic, aromatic flavour that defines the drink.
White sugar: Sweetens the tart lemon juice and helps balance its acidity.
Lemon rind: Adds aromatic oils from the peel, deepening the lemon flavour.

“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.