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Drink

Frozen Punch

A chilled citrus punch made with orange and lemon juice, liquor, sugar, and water.

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

Frozen Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the punch

  1. Peel the oranges and lemons, then squeeze out all the juice.

  2. Add the liquor and sugar, and stir until dissolved.

  3. Mix in the water.

Freeze

  1. Pour the mixture into a freezer and turn slowly and steadily until it is partly frozen.

  2. Allow it to freeze for a long time, but do not let it become too hard.

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. Orange + lemontop 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. Orange + sugartop 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

Sugar
Sweetens the punch and lowers its freezing point so it stays slushy rather than solid.
Liquor
Adds flavour and, like sugar, lowers the freezing point so the punch stays soft.
Oranges
Provide juice for sweet-tart flavour and liquid that forms the base of the punch.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.

The step that matters

Turning the mixture as it partly freezes. Stirring keeps small ice crystals forming evenly, giving a smooth, slushy texture. Letting it freeze solid without stirring makes a hard, icy block.

“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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