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Drink

Claret Cup

A chilled claret punch made with lemon juice, sugar, ice water, and garnished with lemon slices and orange peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

Claret Cup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Squeeze the juice of the lemons into a bowl.

  2. Add the sugar and ice water; stir well.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pour the mixture over a block of ice in a punch bowl.

  2. Peel and slice a lemon thinly.

  3. Float the slices and some orange peel on top.

  4. Pour the claret into the bowl before 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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Claret
Provides the main wine flavour and most of the punch's liquid body.
Sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the acidity of the lemon juice.
Lemons
Add acidity and fresh citrus aroma that brighten the wine.

“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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