Name: Lemonade Sirup
Ingredients: 4 cups water; Juice of 6 lemons; 2 cups sugar

Why it works: Lemon and sugar 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 ↓

Lemonade Sirup

Ingredients

4 cups water
Juice of 6 lemons
2 cups sugar

Directions

Prepare

Wash the lemon rinds if they are good and drop them into boiling water.
Let the rinds stand in the boiling water for fifteen minutes.

Make the syrup

Combine the water, lemon juice, and sugar in a pot and boil until it forms a syrup.

Bottle

Pour the hot syrup into sterilized bottles for storage.

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.

Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar 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: Sweetens the syrup and gives it body as it boils down.
Lemon juice: Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and carries the lemon flavor.

“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.