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Drink

Lenox Punch

A chilled punch made with water, sugar, currant jelly, orange and lemon juice, ginger ale, ice, and garnished with holly sprig.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Lenox Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil water and sugar to make a syrup.

  2. Add currant jelly and stir until dissolved.

Build the punch

  1. Add a piece of ice to the mixture.

  2. Stir in orange juice and lemon juice.

  3. Pour in ginger ale and mix well.

Freeze and serve

  1. Freeze the mixture until it reaches a mushy consistency.

  2. Serve in glasses and garnish each with a small sprig of holly with berries.

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. Currant + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 add sweetness and balance the tart juices.
Currant jelly
Adds fruity flavor, sweetness and color to the punch.
Orange juice
Adds citrusy sweetness and aroma with a bright fruit flavor.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the punch and cuts the sweetness.
Ginger ale
Adds carbonation and a spicy-sweet flavor that lightens the punch.

The step that matters

Freeze to a mushy consistency. Water freezes into ice crystals while sugar and acid lower the freezing point, so the punch only partly freezes into a slush. Freezing too long makes it hard and icy, while stopping too early leaves it liquid.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Blackberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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