Skip to main content
Drink

Fine Milk Punch

A chilled punch made with lemon, brandy or rum, sugar, nutmeg, water, and hot milk.

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

Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fine Milk Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare off the yellow rind of the lemons and steep it in the brandy or rum for 24 hours.

Make the punch

  1. Mix in the lemon juice, loaf sugar, grated nutmegs, and water.

  2. Add the boiling hot rich milk and strain the mixture through a fine strainer.

  3. Serve immediately or bottle and keep in a cool place.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Brandy + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Brandy + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,738 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Their juice and rind supply the sharp acidity and citrus aroma that balance the punch.
Brandy or st. croix rum
Acts as the spirit base that carries the lemon oils and extracts flavour from the rind.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness that offsets the acidity of the lemon juice.
Rich milk
Adds fat and body, and when curdled by the acid it clarifies the punch as it is strained.

The step that matters

Add the boiling hot milk and strain. Adding hot milk to the acidic mixture curdles it, and the curds carry off cloudiness and impurities. Straining through a fine strainer is needed to get a clear, smooth punch.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against brandy, sugar, nutmeg, milk. 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.

More milk punch recipes

Rum 15Cambridge 9Hot 3 See all 169 →

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes