Skip to main content
Drink

Fruit Punch

Fruit Punch is a mixed fruit beverage made with pineapple, tea, sugar syrup, orange and lemon juice, grape juice, 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 ↓

Fruit Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Peel and grate the pineapple, discarding the tough core.

  2. In a pot, add the grated pineapple to 1 cup of boiling water and simmer for 10 minutes.

  3. Add ½ cup of hot tea and a syrup made by boiling 1 pint of water with 1 pint of sugar for 10 minutes.

  4. Set aside the mixture until cold, then strain it.

Finish the punch

  1. Add the strained juice of 3 oranges, 3 lemons, 1 cup of grape juice, and 5 pints of water.

  2. Stir well to combine.

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. Pineapple + grapetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together709 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Orange + grapetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Provides fruity flavour and aroma as the base of the punch.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, dissolved into syrup, balances the acidity of the citrus.
Lemons
Add acidity and brightness that cut through the sweetness.
Oranges
Add citrus juice for sweetness and aroma alongside the lemons.
Grape juice
Adds fruity sweetness and colour to the punch.

Swap the grape

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

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

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