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Drink

Lemonade

A citrus drink made by boiling water, adding lemon slices and sugar, then cooling and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Lemonade

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Boil 1½ pints of water in a kettle.

  2. Wash the lemons.

  3. Peel the lemons thinly, avoiding the white pith.

  4. Remove all the pith from the lemons.

  5. Slice the lemons thinly.

  6. Remove the seeds from the lemon slices.

Make the lemonade

  1. Place the sliced lemons and half the rind in a jug.

  2. Add the loaf sugar to the jug.

  3. Adjust the sweetness to taste.

  4. Pour the boiling water over the lemons in the jug.

  5. Cover the jug.

  6. Let the mixture sit to cool.

  7. Once cold, strain the lemonade into another jug.

  8. Serve.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + 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

Lemons
Provide the main citrus flavour and acidity, with rind adding aromatic oils.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sharp acidity of the lemon.
Water
Serves as the base liquid and carries the lemon and sugar flavours.

The step that matters

Peel the lemons thinly, avoiding the white pith. The white pith is bitter and releases bitter compounds into the drink, so only the thin yellow rind should be removed.

“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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