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Tea Punch

A chilled punch made with strong green tea, lemon rind, sugar, lemon juice, and rum or sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Green tea and rum work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 60 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Tea Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the punch

  1. Combine 3 cups of strong green tea with the rind of 6 thinly pared lemons and 1½ lbs of sugar.

  2. Add the juice of 6 lemons and stir for a few moments.

  3. Let the lemon rind remain in the mixture for several hours to infuse flavor.

  4. Strain the mixture and add 1 quart of rum or 3 pints of sherry.

Serve

  1. Serve in glasses filled with crushed 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. Green tea + rumtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together60 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  2. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

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

  3. Green tea + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together104 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Lemon + rumtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon juice and tea.
Lemons
Supply acidity and aromatic oils from the rind, giving the punch its bright flavor.
Green tea
Provides a light, astringent base that gives the punch body and structure.
Rum or sherry
Adds alcohol, aroma and depth of flavor to the finished punch.

The step that matters

Infusing the lemon rind. Lemon rind holds aromatic oils that release slowly into the liquid. Leaving the rind in for several hours extracts this fragrance, while the rind's bitter pith is avoided by paring it very thinly. Straining before adding the spirit stops the flavor from becoming harsh.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against green tea, sugar, rum. 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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