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Fruit Punch

Fruit punch made with lemon and orange juice, pineapple, cherries, sugar syrup, and mint.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

Fruit Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by dissolving 4 pounds of sugar in water and cooling it.

  2. While the syrup is still warm, add the grated rinds of 1 dozen oranges and 1 dozen lemons.

Assemble and serve

  1. Combine the syrup with the juice from 3 dozen lemons, 2 dozen oranges, the Maraschino cherries, and the diced pineapple.

  2. Add water to taste.

  3. Make the punch 12 hours before serving.

  4. Garnish with mint before 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.

  1. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + minttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,998 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Pineapple + minttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together182 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Orange + minttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together549 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolves into the syrup to provide sweetness and balance the sourness of the citrus.
Lemons
Juice and rind supply the acidity and bright citrus aroma that define the punch.
Oranges
Juice and rind add sweetness, body and aromatic citrus oils to the punch.
Pineapple
Adds fruit sweetness, acidity and juicy body to the punch.

The step that matters

Cool the syrup before combining. Adding the citrus rinds while the syrup is still warm helps extract their aromatic oils, but the syrup must cool before it is mixed with the juices so the punch stays fresh and the flavours do not cook or dull.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Peppermintfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, orange, pineapple, 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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