Skip to main content
Drink

Punch Liqueur Another Way

A punch liqueur made with boiling water, tea, sugar, arrack, lemon juice, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tea and lemon work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 610 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Punch Liqueur Another Way

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tea infusion

  1. Pour boiling water over the tea in an earthenware basin.

  2. Add sugar pieces and place a strainer over another basin.

Melt the sugar

  1. Moisten sugar with arrack and set on fire to melt it.

  2. Once the fire goes out, moisten and ignite again until all sugar is melted.

Finish the punch

  1. Rub a piece of sugar on a lemon and add the juice and wine to the mixture.

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. Tea + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Tea + winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together181 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

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

  5. Tea + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,204 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

Arrack
Adds a strong, aromatic spirit flavour and helps dissolve and ignite the sugar.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity of the lemon and the tea.
Lemons
Provide acidity and fresh citrus aroma that brighten the punch.
Rhenish or burgundy wine
Adds body, fruity wine character and extra liquid to the punch.

The step that matters

Melting the sugar with fire. Alcohol must be warm enough to ignite, and the flame only caramelises and melts the sugar while the alcohol burns off. If the fire goes out early, sugar stays grainy, so the step is repeated until it fully dissolves.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Grapefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against tea, sugar, wine. 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.

You might also like

Lemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesWine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipes