Name: Bottled Lemonade
Ingredients: 2 quarts hot water; 2 lemons, sliced; ½ pound loaf sugar; ¼ ounce gum arabic

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 ↓

Bottled Lemonade

Ingredients

2 quarts hot water
2 lemons, sliced
½ pound loaf sugar
¼ ounce gum arabic

Directions

Combine hot water, sliced lemons, loaf sugar, and gum arabic in a large container.
Strain the mixture through a flannel bag.
Bottle the strained lemonade 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

Loaf sugar: Provides sweetness and dissolves into the hot water to sweeten the lemonade.
Gum arabic: Acts as a stabilizer, giving the lemonade a fuller body and helping keep it from separating.
Lemons: Provide the sharp acidity and citrus aroma 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.