Skip to main content
Drink

Champagne Cup

A chilled drink made with ice, cucumber rind, orange, lemon, Clicquot wine, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Champagne Cup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fill a large glass pitcher halfway with ice.

  2. Slice two strips of cucumber rind, one orange, and one lemon into the pitcher.

  3. Pour 1 quart of Clicquot wine over the ice and fruit.

  4. Sweeten to taste with sugar.

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. Cucumber + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Orange + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,046 recipes

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

  5. Cucumber + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together325 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Clicquot wine
Forms the base of the drink and supplies its main body and flavour.
Orange
Adds citrus aroma and a bright acidity to the wine.
Lemon
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the wine.
Sugar
Sweetens the cup, softening the acidity of the citrus and the wine.

Swap the cucumber

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, lemon, wine, 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.

You might also like

Lemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesWine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipes