Skip to main content
Drink

Neapolitan Punch

A citrus and raisin punch made with Buffalo Lithia water, sugar, cloves, cinnamon, and sliced lemons.

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

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Neapolitan Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the lemons very thinly.

  2. Juice the oranges and add the pulp.

Make the punch

  1. Combine lemons, orange juice, sugar, cloves, cinnamon, and raisins in a large container.

  2. Pour 2 gallons of Buffalo Lithia water over the mixture.

  3. Stir daily for 5 days.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the mixture and bottle it.

  2. Serve with cracked ice.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  3. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  4. Orange + cinnamontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Orange + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Provides sweetness and helps draw flavor out of the fruit.
Lemons
Add acidity and bright citrus flavor, with peel oils contributing aroma.
Oranges
Add juice for sweetness, acidity and fruity flavor.
Cloves
Contribute a warm, aromatic spice flavor.
Cinnamon
Contributes warm, sweet aroma and spice flavor.

The step that matters

Stir daily for 5 days. Regular stirring keeps the sugar dissolving and distributes the fruit and spices evenly, so the flavor extracts consistently rather than settling unevenly at the bottom of the container.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, orange, sugar, clove, cinnamon, buffalo):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, orange, sugar, clove, cinnamon, buffalo. 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 recipesOrange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipes