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Drink

Cherry Punch

A chilled beverage made with sugar syrup, orange rind, cherry juice, orange juice, lemon juice, and garnished with whole cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Cherry Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan.

  2. Stir over heat until sugar dissolves.

  3. Add grated orange rind and boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat and strain the mixture.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in cherry juice, orange juice, and lemon juice.

  2. Cool the mixture and freeze it.

  3. Serve in glasses, garnishing each with 3 whole cherries.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Orange + cherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together689 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Cherry + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  5. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

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

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form a syrup that sweetens the punch and gives it body.
Cherry juice
Supplies the main cherry flavour and colour, along with liquid for the punch.
Orange juice
Adds bright citrus aroma and acidity that balances the sweetness.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the flavour and keeps the punch from tasting flat.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture fully before freezing. Freezing a warm mixture takes longer and forms larger ice crystals, giving a coarser texture. Cooling it first helps the punch freeze smoothly and evenly.

Swap the cherry

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Cherrythe original

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