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Drink

Lemon Water Ice, or Orange

A frozen drink of lemon and orange juice with sugar, water, and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Lemon Water Ice, or Orange

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water together.

  2. Chip the yellow rind from 3 lemons and the orange.

  3. Add the rinds to the syrup.

  4. Boil for 5 minutes and let cool.

Add the juice and freeze

  1. Squeeze the juice from the lemons and orange.

  2. Add the juice to the cold syrup.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Freeze the mixture.

Finish with egg white

  1. Just before removing from the freezer, beat the egg white with 1 tablespoon of sugar until stiff.

  2. Fold the beaten egg white into the mixture to make it white and frothy.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Lemons
Provide the main tart flavour and most of the liquid in the ice.
Sugar
Sweetens the ice and lowers its freezing point so it stays soft and scoopable.
Egg white
Whipped to stiff foam, it lightens the frozen mixture and makes it white and frothy.
Water
Dissolves the sugar to form the syrup that becomes the base of the ice.

The step that matters

Folding the beaten egg white into the mixture. Stiff egg white foam holds air only if it is not overworked. Folding gently keeps the bubbles intact, so the ice stays light and frothy instead of deflating into a dense, flat texture.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Orangethe original
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Raisinfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, egg. 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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