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Ginger Ale Fruit Punch

A chilled fruit punch made with sugar, hot tea, orange juice, lemon juice, ginger ale, charged water, and thin slices of orange and banana.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Ginger Ale Fruit Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Mix sugar with hot tea until dissolved.

  2. Add orange juice, lemon juice, and thin slices of orange and banana.

Serve

  1. Pour into a punch bowl over a large square of ice.

  2. Just before serving, add ginger ale and charged water.

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the acidity of the citrus juices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the punch and balances the sweetness.
Ginger ale
Adds carbonation and a spiced ginger flavour to the punch.
Charged water
Adds fizz, keeping the punch lively and sparkling.

The step that matters

Add the ginger ale and charged water just before serving. Carbonation escapes over time, so adding the fizzy liquids late keeps the punch sparkling rather than flat.

Swap the banana

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

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

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