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Cranberry Punch

A chilled fruit punch made with cranberries, raisins, sugar, lemon juice, ice, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,481 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Cranberry Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the raisins

  1. Remove seeds from the raisins.

  2. Cover the raisins with boiling water and let cook for 30 minutes.

  3. Drain the raisins, reserving the liquid, and add the liquid to the cranberries.

Make the cranberry base

  1. Cook the cranberries for 8 minutes.

  2. Force the cooked cranberries through a sieve.

  3. Add the sugar and lemon juice to the cranberry mixture.

Freeze and serve

  1. Freeze the mixture to a mush, using equal parts of finely crushed ice and coarse sea salt.

  2. Serve the mixture in punch glasses.

  3. Garnish each glass with three or four cooked raisins.

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. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  2. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Cranberries
Provide the tart flavor, bright color, and body of the punch.
Raisins
Add sweetness and a mellow, rounded flavor, and soften when simmered in water.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the frozen mixture soft and spoonable.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Freezing the mixture to a mush. Salt mixed with crushed ice lowers its melting point, so the ice stays cold enough to chill the punch to a slush. Finely crushed ice gives even contact, and the mixture must be frozen only to a mush, not a solid.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, 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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