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Drink

Fruit Punch

Fruit punch made with oranges, lemons, pineapple, ginger ale, Apollinaris water, sugar syrup, served chilled with ice and 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 ↓

Fruit Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Cook sugar and water to make a syrup.

  2. Add grated pineapple to the syrup.

Assemble and serve

  1. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and lemons, then add to the mixture.

  2. Finally, add ginger ale and Apollinaris water.

  3. Put in a large piece of ice and serve with 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 + gingertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  4. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Ginger + pineappletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together559 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the punch and dissolves into the water to form a syrup.
Oranges
Contribute juice for sweet acidity and fruity aroma.
Lemons
Contribute juice for acidity that balances the sugar.
Grated pineapple
Adds fruit flavour and pulp to the syrup.
Ginger ale
Adds carbonation and sweet ginger flavour to the punch.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Blackberryfits about as well
  4. Pineapplethe original

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