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Drink

Lime Water

A beverage made by steeping an unslaked lime in boiling water, then diluting with distilled or boiled water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lime and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 115 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Lime Water

Ingredients

Directions

Slake the lime

  1. Gradually add boiling water to the unslaked lime.

  2. Stir occasionally and let it stand for half an hour.

  3. Allow the lime to settle, then pour off and discard the water.

Make and bottle the solution

  1. Add distilled or boiled water to the lime and stir thoroughly.

  2. Let coarse particles settle and pour the solution into bottles.

  3. Cork the bottles tightly and shake occasionally to keep the solution saturated.

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. Lime + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together115 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Unslaked lime
Reacts with water to form calcium hydroxide, the compound that dissolves to make the lime water.
Distilled or boiled water
Acts as the solvent that dissolves the slaked lime into a clear solution.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling water gradually to the unslaked lime. Slaking lime is an exothermic reaction that releases heat and can spatter or boil over if the water is added all at once. Adding it slowly keeps the reaction controlled and lets the lime react evenly.

“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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