Skip to main content
Drink

Fruit Punch

Fruit Punch is a sweet beverage made with sugar syrup, tea, fruit juices, pineapple, strawberry syrup, cherries, and Apollinaris water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 punch base

  1. Make a syrup by boiling sugar and 1 cup of water for 10 minutes.

  2. Add tea, fruit, lemon juice, pineapple, and strawberry syrup to the syrup.

  3. Let the mixture stand for 30 minutes, then strain it.

  4. Add enough ice water to make 1½ gallons of liquid.

Serve

  1. Pour into a large punch bowl over a piece of ice.

  2. Add cherries and Apollinaris water.

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. Strawberry + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together433 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Strawberry + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together726 recipes

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

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, when boiled into a syrup, dissolves evenly into the liquid.
Lemons
Add acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the flavour.
Strawberry syrup
Adds concentrated fruit flavour and colour to the punch.
Apollinaris water
Adds carbonation, giving the punch a lively fizz when poured in.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand before straining. Standing lets the tea and fruit release their flavour into the syrup, and straining afterward removes solids so the punch stays clear and smooth.

Swap the strawberry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Strawberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, tea, syrup, lemon, pineapple, orange. 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.

You might also like

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipes