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Drink

Punch

A chilled fruit punch made with lemon, orange, pineapple, banana, strawberry, tea, sugar, and ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tea and fruit

  1. Dissolve sugar in tea while stirring.

  2. Grate 8 lemons and extract all the juice.

  3. Cut 3 oranges into slices.

  4. Shred 1 pineapple, peel and remove the eyes, tear apart with a silver fork, reject the cores, sprinkle with sugar, and let stand on ice for 12 hours.

  5. Slice 5 bananas very thin and hull 1 pint of strawberries.

Macerate and serve

  1. When the tea is cold, add all the fruit and let stand in the refrigerator for several hours.

  2. Place a cube of ice in the punch bowl, pour the mixture around it, and serve in punch glasses when chilled.

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. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Lemon + teatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

  5. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Sugared and left on ice, it releases juice and flavor into the punch.
Lemons
Juice and grated zest add acidity and aroma that balance the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the tea and draws juice from the fruit as it stands.
Bananas
Thin slices soften in the liquid and add body and sweetness.
Strawberries
Hulled berries add fruity aroma and color to the punch.

The step that matters

Letting the pineapple stand on ice for 12 hours. Sugar draws water out of the fruit by osmosis, so a long soak in sugar softens the pineapple and pulls out its juice and flavor. Keeping it cold slows fermentation and spoilage during the long rest.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, orange, pineapple, tea, sugar. 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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