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Drink

Ceylon Tea Punch

A fruit‑laden tea punch made with Ceylon tea, citrus, bananas, pineapple, berries, cherries, sugar, ice, and optional claret or water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Ceylon Tea Punch

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Brew 1 gallon of Ceylon tea and let it cool.

  2. Add the juice of 12 lemons and the grated rind of 2 lemons.

  3. Stir in the juice of 3 oranges and slices from 2 more oranges.

  4. Mix in 3 sliced bananas and 1 small can of pineapple or 1 small fresh pineapple, sliced.

  5. Add Logan berries, strawberries, or crushed raspberries if in season, or about 36 Maraschino cherries if not.

  6. Sweeten with sugar to taste and add a block of ice.

  7. If desired, mix in 1 quart of claret.

  8. Optionally, add a little Shasta water to enhance the flavor.

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. Banana + pineappletop 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. Tea + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ceylon tea
Provides the base liquid and its tannins give the punch a dry, astringent backbone.
Lemons
Add acidity that balances the sugar and brightens the tea.
Oranges
Add juice and sweetness, rounding out the acidity from the lemons.
Sugar
Sweetens the punch to taste, balancing the tea's bitterness and the citrus acidity.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tea, lemon, orange, pineapple, 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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