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Fine Milk Punch

A chilled alcoholic beverage made with lemon rind, brandy or rum, sugar, nutmeg, water, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Fine Milk Punch

Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fine Milk Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the punch

  1. Remove the yellow rind from the lemons and steep it in 1 quart of brandy or rum for 24 hours.

  2. Mix in the lemon juice, loaf sugar, grated nutmegs, and water.

  3. Heat the milk until boiling, then add it to the mixture.

  4. Strain the entire mixture through a jelly bag.

Serve

  1. Serve cold or bottle for later use.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Brandy + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Brandy + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,738 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Their juice and rind add acidity and bright citrus aroma that balance the sweetness.
Brandy or rum
Steeping the rind in spirit extracts its oils and adds alcohol for aroma and keeping quality.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness that offsets the acidity of the lemon juice.
Rich unskimmed milk
Its proteins curdle with the acid, and straining removes the solids, leaving a clarified, softer punch.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling milk to the mixture. Hot milk meeting acidic lemon juice curdles its proteins. Those curds, and the fat they carry, are what the jelly bag strains out to clarify the punch, so the milk should be added in one steady pour and the mixture strained fully.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (brandy, sugar, nutmeg, milk):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against brandy, sugar, nutmeg, milk. 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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