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Ratcliffe Punch

A punch made with sherry wine, cherry bounce, peach cordial, whiskey, citrus, sugar, and ice.

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

Ratcliffe Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the punch

  1. Combine sherry wine, cherry bounce, peach cordial, and whiskey in a large container.

  2. Add sliced oranges and lemon.

  3. Dissolve the loaf sugar in water or strong green tea and pour into the mixture.

Serve and store

  1. Add a large lump of ice about an hour before serving.

  2. Store in bottles; it will keep for months.

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. Cherry + peachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together177 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Cherry + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together689 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Peach + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together385 recipes

    Shared aroma: pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Cherry + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Sherry wine
Forms the wine base and adds dry, nutty depth to the punch.
Whiskey
Provides the strong spirit backbone and helps preserve the punch.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the alcohol and the acidity of the citrus.
Cherry bounce
Contributes cherry sweetness and fruit flavour to the blend.
Peach cordial
Adds sweet peach flavour and aroma to the mixture.

The step that matters

Dissolve the loaf sugar fully. Undissolved sugar sinks and makes sweetness uneven across the punch. Dissolving it in liquid first lets it blend evenly into the alcohol before the mixture is poured in.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sherry, wine, cherry, peach, orange, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sherry, wine, cherry, peach, orange, 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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