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Drink

Fruit Punch

A chilled fruit punch made with citrus, pineapple, cherries, bananas, candied cherries, sugar, ice, and sparkling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Fruit Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Strain the juice of the lemons and oranges into a bowl.

  2. Add diced pineapple, black cherries, sliced bananas, red candied cherries, and thinly sliced lemons.

  3. Mix well and sweeten to taste with sugar.

  4. Chill the mixture until cold.

Serve

  1. Fifteen minutes before serving, fill a bowl half full of crushed ice.

  2. Pour the punch over the ice and add the bottle of Apollinaris water.

  3. Serve in punch glasses.

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. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Lemon + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 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

Lemons
Their juice adds acidity that balances the sugar and brightens the fruit flavors.
Oranges
Their juice adds sweetness and body to the punch base.
Bananas
Sliced bananas add soft texture and mild sweetness to the mixture.
Sugar
Sweetens the punch, balancing the acidity of the citrus juices.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, pineapple, banana, 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.

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