Name: Presbyterian Punch
Ingredients: 48 lemons, juiced; 24 oranges, juiced; 2 cans pineapple juice; 2 cans cherry juice; 2 boxes strawberries, one cooked, sweetened, and strained; Sugar, to taste; Grape juice, enough for color

Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

Presbyterian Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juices

Juice the lemons and oranges.
Combine the lemon juice, orange juice, pineapple juice, cherry juice, and strained strawberries in a large bowl.
Add sugar to taste, similar to the amount used for lemonade.
Stir in grape juice until the mixture has a good wine color.

Serve

Use the remaining strawberries whole, adding one or two to each glass when serving.

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.

Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Pineapple + grapetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together709 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).
Pineapple + cherrytop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together537 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,664 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Cherry + grapetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together696 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

Lemons: Provide the main acidity that balances the sweetness of the punch.
Oranges: Add sweetness and citrus aroma to the juice base.
Strawberries: Contribute fruity flavor and body when cooked, sweetened, and strained.
Sugar: Sweetens the punch to taste, balancing the citrus acidity.
Grape juice: Deepens the color so the punch looks like a good wine.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, pineapple, cherry, sugar, grape):

Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Apricotfits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, pineapple, cherry, sugar, grape. 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.