Name: Lemonade for Picnics
Ingredients: 2 quarts water; 4 cups sugar; 4½ cups lemon juice

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 ↓

Lemonade for Picnics

Ingredients

2 quarts water
4 cups sugar
4½ cups lemon juice

Directions

Make the syrup

Boil the water and sugar together for 10 minutes.
Remove the syrup from heat and add the lemon juice.
Let the mixture cool.

Store and serve

Seal in glass jars and store in a cool place.
To make lemonade, dilute the syrup with ice water.

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: Dissolves into the water to make a sweet syrup that balances the lemon's tartness.
Lemon juice: Supplies the sour acidity and bright flavour that define the lemonade.

“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.