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Champagne Cup

A chilled champagne cocktail with ice, sugar, bitters, cherries, fruits, mint, cucumber rind, and dry champagne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mint and cucumber work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 884 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Champagne Cup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place the large piece of ice in a two-quart glass pitcher.

  2. Add the sugar and drop 4 drops of Angostura bitters on each lump.

  3. Include the cocktail cherries and assorted fresh fruits.

  4. Add the washed mint and the lengthwise cucumber rind.

  5. Pour in 1 quart of dry champagne.

  6. After the first quart is consumed, you can add a second quart over the same ingredients for enhanced flavor.

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. Mint + cucumbertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together884 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Mint + champagnetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Cucumber + champagnetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  4. Sugar + champagnetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together424 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + cucumbertop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,112 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

Dry champagne
Provides the sparkling, dry base that carries the flavours of the cup.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the dryness of the champagne and the bitters.
Angostura bitters
Adds aromatic, spiced bitterness that rounds out the sweetness.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Peppermintfits about as well
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cucumber, champagne. 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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