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Drink

Fruit Punch

Fruit Punch is a chilled beverage made with lemon juice, black tea, citrus slices, pineapple, cherries, strawberry juice, sparkling water, and ice.

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. Squeeze juice from the lemons and remove the seeds.

  2. Add the black tea, sliced lemons, sliced oranges, pineapple, Maraschino cherries, and strawberry juice.

  3. Sweeten to taste and cool the mixture.

  4. Sugar the fruit 2 hours before using to extract juice.

Serve

  1. Pour into a punch bowl over a large piece of ice.

  2. Add the Apollinaris just before serving.

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 + strawberrytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together433 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Orange + strawberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together726 recipes

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

  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

Sugar
Sweetens the punch and, macerating the fruit, draws out juice.
Black tea
Adds tannin for a mildly bitter, astringent backbone that balances the sweetness.
Lemons
Provide acidity that brightens the punch and balances the sugar.
Apollinaris or sparkling water
Adds carbonation, giving lightness and a lively fizz.

The step that matters

Sugar the fruit 2 hours before using. Sugar draws water out of fruit by osmosis, pulling out juice and flavor. Given time, the fruit softens and releases its juice into the mixture. Adding the sparkling water early would lose its fizz, so it goes in just before serving.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Grapefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against black tea, orange, pineapple, strawberry, 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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