Name: Refreshino Drink
Ingredients: ½ ounce prunes; 1 ounce cranberries; ½ ounce raisins; 1 quart water; lemon peel or lemon essence for flavor

Why it works: Raisin and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,742 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Refreshino Drink

Ingredients

Directions

Make the infusion

Combine prunes, cranberries, raisins, and water in a pot.
Boil the mixture until it reduces to 1 pint.

Finish and store

Strain the liquid and flavor with lemon peel or lemon essence.
Store the drink in a tightly covered container.

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.

Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,742 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Prunes: Contribute sweetness and a deep, mellow fruit flavor to the drink.
Cranberries: Add tart acidity and a bright color to the infusion.
Raisins: Add concentrated sweetness and fruity body to the liquid.
Water: Acts as the solvent that extracts flavor from the dried and fresh fruit.

“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.