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Drink

Raspberry Punch

A chilled fruit punch made with raspberries, lemons, oranges, bananas, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Raspberry Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the punch

  1. Juice the raspberries and lemons.

  2. Add the pulp of the oranges and diced bananas.

  3. Mix in enough water to create a drinkable consistency.

  4. Sweeten to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve ice cold.

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

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

  3. Lemon + bananatop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Banana + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Red raspberries
Provide the main flavour and colour of the punch.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the sweetness and balances the fruit.
Bananas
Add body and a soft, creamy texture to the punch.

Swap the banana

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, 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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