Name: Frozen Strawberries
Ingredients: 1 quart strawberries; 1 pint granulated sugar; 1 quart water; juice of 2 lemons

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 ↓

Frozen Strawberries

Ingredients

1 quart strawberries
1 pint granulated sugar
1 quart water
juice of 2 lemons

Directions

Prepare

Mash the strawberries with the granulated sugar and lemon juice.
Add the water and stir until the sugar is dissolved.

Freeze

Freeze the mixture.

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

Strawberries: Provide the main fruit flavour, colour and body of the mixture.
Granulated sugar: Sweetens the mixture and lowers its freezing point, keeping the frozen texture softer.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the strawberry flavour and helps keep its colour.

“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.