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Drink

Fruit Punch

A chilled beverage made with tea, citrus juice, sugar syrup, rum or sherry, served over ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and lemon work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 610 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the cold tea with the juice of the lemon or lime.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the sugar with a little water to make a syrup.

  3. Add the syrup to the tea mixture.

  4. Stir in the rum or sherry.

Serve

  1. Serve over chopped 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. Tea + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

  2. Tea + rumtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85 recipes

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

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

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

  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
Sweetens the punch and, dissolved into syrup, blends smoothly into the cold tea.
Lemon or lime juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the flavour.
Tea
Provides tannin, giving the punch a light astringent body and depth.
Rum or sherry
Adds alcohol and aroma, contributing warmth and a distinct flavour to the punch.

The step that matters

Making the syrup. Sugar dissolves far more easily in hot liquid than in cold, so dissolving it first in a little water as a syrup prevents grittiness and ensures even sweetness when it is added to the cold tea.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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