Skip to main content
Drink

Ceanbbeey Punch

A chilled cranberry punch made with cranberries, raisins, sugar, lemon juice, ice, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Raisin and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,481 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Ceanbbeey Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Remove seeds from the raisins, cover with boiling water, and let cook for 30 minutes.

  2. Drain the raisins, reserving the liquid, and add it to the cranberries.

  3. Cook the cranberries for 8 minutes and then force through a sieve.

Make the punch

  1. Add sugar and lemon juice to the cranberry mixture.

  2. Freeze the mixture to a mush, using equal parts of finely crushed ice and coarse sea salt.

Serve

  1. Serve in punch glasses and garnish each glass with three or four cooked raisins.

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. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Cranberries
Provide the tart fruit flavour and body that the punch is built on.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the tartness of the cranberries.
Raisins
Add sweetness and soft texture, and their cooking liquid adds flavour to the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.

The step that matters

Freeze the mixture to a mush. The ice and salt mixture must chill the punch to a slushy texture. Freezing it too firmly makes it hard to serve, while too little chilling leaves it runny.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, 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.

You might also like

Raisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipes