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Drink

Fruit Punch

Fruit Punch is a beverage made with lemons, oranges, tea, cherries, pineapple, water or ginger ale, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

  1. Heat 8 cups of sugar with 3 gallons of water until thoroughly dissolved.

  2. Add plain water to the tea.

  3. Mix in the fruit and juices.

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 + gingertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Tea + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together216 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides sweetness and dissolves into the water to sweeten the whole punch.
Lemons
Add sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the flavour.
Oranges
Add juice, sweetness and aromatic citrus oils.
Tea
Adds tannins for a slightly bitter, astringent backbone that offsets the sugar.
Grated pineapple
Adds juice, fruity sweetness and acidity to the punch.

The step that matters

Dissolve the sugar thoroughly. Sugar must fully dissolve in the hot water before the other liquids are added. Undissolved crystals can settle as grit, and a fully dissolved syrup blends evenly so the sweetness is consistent in every glass.

Swap the pineapple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, orange, tea, ginger, 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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