Skip to main content
Drink

Circus Punch

A fruit punch made with orange, lemon, apricot, prune, and cherry juices, sugar syrup, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Circus Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan.

  2. Heat until sugar dissolves, then cool.

Assemble and chill

  1. Add the fruit juices to the syrup to make 1 pint.

  2. Allow the mixture to combine for 10 minutes.

  3. Chill the mixture.

  4. For a pretty pink color, use a vegetable coloring.

Serve

  1. Serve with ice and cherries.

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. Apricot + cherrytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together252 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Orange + apricottop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together703 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Orange + cherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together689 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + cherrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,301 recipes

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

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 balances the acidity of the citrus and fruit juices.
Apricot juice
Adds fruity flavor and sweetness to the punch.
Prune juice
Adds deep fruity flavor and body to the punch.
Cherry juice
Adds fruity flavor and color to the punch.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, apricot, cherry, 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

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipes