Skip to main content
Drink

Tea Punch

A punch made with sherry, rum, citrus, sugar, and green tea.

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

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 ↓

Tea Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the oranges and lemons very thin.

  2. Pour boiling tea over the thin rinds.

  3. Mix the juice of the lemons and oranges with the sugar.

  4. Add the juice mixture to the other ingredients.

  5. Once the tea has cooled, add it along with the rum.

Serve

  1. For best flavor, mix the punch the day before serving.

  2. Just before serving, add some chipped ice.

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. Sherry + rumtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together146 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Rum + green teatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together60 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Rum + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together801 recipes

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

  5. Sherry + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together823 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Sherry
Forms the wine base of the punch, contributing body and mellow sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the acidity of the citrus juice.
Lemons
Provide acidity and bright citrus flavor, with peel oils adding aroma.
Oranges
Add sweetness, juice, and aromatic citrus oils from the peel.
Green tea
Adds tannin for a slightly bitter, dry note that balances the sweetness.
Old jamaica rum
Adds depth and aroma, with its flavor blending into the punch over time.

The step that matters

Steeping the peel in boiling tea. Citrus peel oils are aromatic and fat-soluble, and they extract best into hot liquid. Pouring boiling tea over very thin rinds captures their flavor, but cooking or steeping too long can pull in bitterness from the pith and tea.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sherry, sugar, rum, orange, green tea):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sherry, sugar, rum, orange, green tea. 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