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Frozen Punch

A chilled punch made with tea, ginger ale, pineapple, lemon, ice, salt, and garnished with cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Frozen Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the punch

  1. Brew 3 1/2 quarts of tea and stir in sugar while hot until dissolved.

  2. When the tea is cold, add ginger ale, shredded pineapple, and juice from the lemons. Stir well.

  3. Freeze the mixture and let it stand packed for two hours.

Serve

  1. Prepare a mixture of two parts finely crushed ice to one part coarse sea salt.

  2. Serve the punch with a cherry on top of each serving.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + teatop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together216 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + teatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

  4. Ginger + pineappletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together559 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Pineapple + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolves into the hot tea to add sweetness and help keep the frozen punch from freezing rock-hard.
Lemons
Their juice adds acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar and ginger ale.
Ginger ale
Adds carbonation-derived sweetness and a light spiced flavor to the punch.
Tea
Forms the liquid base of the punch and carries the flavor of the other ingredients.

The step that matters

Freeze the mixture and let it stand packed for two hours. Sugar lowers the freezing point, so the mixture stays slushy rather than solid. Letting it stand packed for two hours lets it firm into a scoopable texture, so it should not be served straight from the freezer.

Swap the pineapple

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

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

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