Skip to main content
Drink

Currant Punch

A chilled fruit punch made with currants, raspberries, sugar, vinegar, orange juice, and shaved ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Red currant and orange work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Currant Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash the red currants and red raspberries thoroughly.

  2. Pour 1 pint of boiling water over the fruit and cover tightly.

  3. Once cooled, press the mixture through a sieve.

Sweeten and serve

  1. Stir in 1½ cups of sugar, 1 tablespoon of white wine vinegar, and the juice of 1 orange.

  2. Chill thoroughly and serve in slender glasses filled with shaved ice.

  3. Add a small sprig of fresh mint to each glass.

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. Red currant + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together124 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Red currant + minttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27 recipes

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

  4. White wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. White wine + orangetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together730 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the tart, fruity base flavour that defines the punch.
Red raspberries
Add sweet, aromatic fruit flavour and colour to the juice.
Sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the sharp fruit and vinegar acidity.
White wine vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the fruit flavour and keeps it from tasting flat.

The step that matters

Pressing the mixture through a sieve. Pressing forces the juice out of the fruit while the seeds and pulp stay behind. Pressing too hard can push fine pulp through and cloud the punch, so press gently.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (red currant, sugar, white wine, vinegar, orange):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against red currant, sugar, white wine, vinegar, 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

Raspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesWine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipes