Why it works: Bitter orange and champagne work together. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓
Punch a LA Cardinal
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the infusion
Cut the rind of the green bitter oranges very thin and let it dry in the air for a few hours.
Roast the dried rind until golden brown.
Place the roasted rind in a bottle and cover it with deodorized alcohol.
Cork tightly and set in the sun for a week.
Make and serve the punch
Prepare a sherbet similar to Roman punch, using only champagne and the bitter orange infusion as the main flavor.
Tint the sherbet a fine red color with a little carmine before serving.
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.
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Bitter orange + champagnetop 34% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together1 recipe
Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Bitter orange rind
- Supplies the bitter aromatic flavor that the infusion carries into the punch.
- Deodorized alcohol
- Extracts the aromatic oils and flavor from the roasted orange rind.
- Champagne
- Forms the liquid base of the sherbet and provides its sparkling character.
- Carmine
- Adds a red colour to the finished sherbet without affecting its flavor.
The step that matters
Roasting the dried rind until golden brown. Roasting drives off moisture and develops browned, toasty flavour compounds in the peel. Under-roasting leaves the infusion raw and harsh, while over-roasting makes it bitter and burnt.
“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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