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Drink

Fruit Punch

Fruit Punch is a chilled beverage made with tea, sugar, lemon, orange, pineapple, banana, strawberry, and ice.

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 tea base

  1. Steep the tea in boiling water for 5 minutes, then strain.

  2. Add the sugar to the tea and stir until dissolved.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Grate the lemons and extract the juice.

  2. Cut the oranges into slices.

  3. Shred the pineapple.

  4. Slice the bananas thin.

  5. Hull the strawberries.

Combine and serve

  1. Once the tea is cold, add all the fruit and refrigerate for several hours.

  2. Place an ice cube in a punch bowl, pour the mixture around it, and serve in punch glasses.

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. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Tea + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

  5. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Tea
Provides the base flavour and a light tannin bitterness that balances the sugar and fruit.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the acidity of the citrus.
Lemons
Add acidity and aroma from the zest and juice.
Pineapple
Adds sweetness, tropical flavour and juiciness to the punch.
Bananas
Add body and creaminess as they soften during chilling.
Strawberries
Add fresh fruit aroma and a mild sweet-tart flavour.

The step that matters

Chilling the fruit after the tea cools. Fruit added to warm tea will soften and discolour quickly and may taste cooked. Waiting until the tea is cold keeps the fruit fresh, and several hours of chilling lets the flavours blend.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Bananathe original

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