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Dessert

Cherry Punch

A frozen dessert made from cherry juice, sugar syrup, and Italian meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,598 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cherry Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by combining the sugar and water in a pot; do not boil.

  2. Add the cherry juice to the syrup and freeze until nearly solid.

Make the meringue

  1. Beat the egg whites with the sugar until soft peaks form.

  2. Melt the meringue mixture over low heat, then beat until cool.

Combine and freeze

  1. Mix the meringue into the cherry syrup, then freeze until firm.

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 + cherrytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,598 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Cherry + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,611 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped into a meringue that lightens the frozen texture and keeps it from freezing hard.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the syrup and meringue and lowers the freezing point, keeping the dessert scoopable.
Cherry juice
Provides the main cherry flavour and colour, and liquid that freezes into the base.

The step that matters

Melt the meringue mixture over low heat, then beat until cool. Heating whipped egg whites with sugar gently dissolves the sugar and stabilises the foam. Too much heat can scramble the eggs or collapse the foam, so keep the heat low and stop as soon as the sugar dissolves.

Swap the cherry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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