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Drink

Punch a LA Bomaine

A chilled lemon punch with sugar, egg whites, maraschino, and champagne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Punch a LA Bomaine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemon base

  1. Peel the lemons and soak them in fresh water.

  2. Rub the peel of 3 lemons on a lump of sugar to extract the essence. Squeeze the juice of the lemons onto the sugared essence.

  3. Add spring water and sweeten with syrup to 22 degrees on the saccharometer.

Make the punch

  1. Freeze the mixture and stir well.

  2. Whip the egg whites until firm and mix in 1 lb of boiling syrup. Once cooled, combine the egg mixture with the frozen lemon mixture.

  3. Before serving, mix in kershwasser, maraschino, and sparkling champagne.

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. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Lemon + champagnetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Lemon + syruptop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Lemon and sugar 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

Lemons
Their peel supplies aromatic oils and their juice provides the sharp acidity of the punch.
Egg whites
Whipped to a firm foam, they lighten the punch and give it a airy, smooth texture.
Syrup
Sugar dissolved in water sweetens the punch and balances the acidity of the lemons.
Sparkling champagne
Adds effervescence and a light, dry wine character to the finished punch.

The step that matters

Whip the egg whites until firm. Egg whites must be whipped to a stable foam before the hot syrup is added. Under-whipped whites stay loose and the punch loses its light, airy texture.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Pineapplefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, syrup, egg, champagne. 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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