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Drink

A Pleasant Summer Drink

A chilled beverage made with tartaric acid, sugar, lemon juice, water, egg whites, flour, wintergreen essence, syrup, and soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

A Pleasant Summer Drink

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil tartaric acid, white sugar, lemon juice, and water together for 5 minutes.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

  3. Add beaten egg whites, flour, and essence of wintergreen.

  4. Bottle the mixture and store in a cool place.

Serve

  1. To serve, mix 2 tablespoons of syrup with a tumbler of water and add ¼ teaspoon of soda.

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. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + syruptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,540 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

White sugar
Provides sweetness and body to balance the sharpness of the acid.
Tartaric acid
Provides the sour, acidic bite that defines the tonic.
Whites of eggs
Beaten whites add foam and light body to the mixture.
Flour
Thickens the mixture slightly and helps suspend the beaten whites.
Soda
Reacts with the acid to release carbon dioxide, creating fizz when served.

The step that matters

Adding the soda at serving. Soda reacts with the acid to release carbon dioxide, so it should be added just before serving; added early, the fizz is lost before the drink is poured.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, flour, syrup):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, flour, syrup. 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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