Name: Excellent Portable Lemonade
Ingredients: ¼ pound sugar; 1 very fine juicy lemon; water

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 ↓

Excellent Portable Lemonade

Ingredients

¼ pound sugar
1 very fine juicy lemon
water

Directions

Make the sugar base

Grate the rind of the lemon and mix it with the sugar until powdered.
Pour the strained juice of the lemon over the sugar mixture.
Press the mixture into a jar for storage.

Serve

To serve, dissolve 1 tablespoon of the mixture in a glass of water.
If too sweet, add a small amount of citric acid to taste.

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.

Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked 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 helps draw the aromatic oils out of the lemon rind.
Lemon rind: Adds aroma from the oils held in its outer skin.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity and a tart, bright 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.