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Drink

Strawberry Cup

A chilled strawberry and orange juice drink sweetened with sugar and flavored with vanilla, served with crushed ice and sparkling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Strawberry and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,385 recipes. Both carry p-vinylguaiacol, which smells spicy, fruity. The science ↓

Strawberry Cup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Choose fully-ripened strawberries, rinse, and drain them.

  2. Heat the strawberries briefly with a little water to intensify their color.

  3. Press the strawberries through a fine sieve to extract the seeds.

Make the syrup

  1. Cook the sugar with ½ cup boiling water for 5 minutes; cool.

Assemble the cup

  1. Add the strawberry and orange juices to the cooled sugar mixture.

  2. Stir in the vanilla.

  3. Add crushed ice.

  4. Mix in the Apollinaris 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.

  1. Strawberry + vanillatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,385 recipes

    Shared aroma: p-vinylguaiacol (spicy, fruity).

  2. Orange + vanillatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,371 recipes

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

  3. Strawberry + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together726 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  5. Strawberry + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,060 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Strawberry juice
Provides the main fruit flavor and the red color.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the drink and balances the acidity of the fruit juices.
Orange juice
Adds citrus acidity and brightness to the strawberry flavor.
Apollinaris water
Adds carbonation, giving the drink a lively, bubbly texture.

The step that matters

Heat the strawberries briefly with a little water. Heating only briefly helps set the color and release pigment without cooking off the fresh fruit flavor. Overheating can dull the red color and make the juice taste cooked.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Blueberryfits better
  2. Bananafits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against strawberry, sugar, vanilla. 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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