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Drink

Virginia Punch

A chilled punch made with blood‑orange juice, powdered sugar, Maraschino liqueur, and seltzer, served over cracked ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Virginia Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the drink

  1. Fill long glasses half full with cracked ice.

  2. Squeeze the juice of a large blood-orange into each glass.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of powdered sugar and 1 ounce of Maraschino liqueur.

  4. Cover with a shaker and shake well.

  5. Pour back and forth from the shaker to the glass four times.

  6. Fill up the glass with seltzer.

Serve

  1. Decorate with a ½ slice of orange and place 2 straws in the glass before serving.

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. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Blood-orange juice
Provides the main citrus acidity and fresh orange flavour.
Maraschino liqueur
Adds sweetness and a cherry-almond aroma to the punch.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the drink and dissolves quickly in the citrus juice.

“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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