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Drink

Claret Cup

A chilled cocktail made with claret, club soda, mint, lemon, sugar, brandy, Curacao, and garnished with citrus and mint.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Claret Cup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chill the claret and club soda in the bottle.

Make the base

  1. In a glass pitcher, mix crushed mint juice, lemon juice, sugar, brandy, and Curacao.

  2. Add the chilled claret and club soda to the pitcher.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish with the thin peel of lemon, slices of orange, and pineapple.

  2. Top with a bunch of dampened fresh mint sprinkled with powdered 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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Mint + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,998 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Mint + pineappletop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together182 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Mint + orangetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together549 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Claret
Provides the main wine body, colour and fruity flavour of the punch.
Brandy
Adds spirit strength and warming depth that balances the wine and fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and keeps the drink fresh tasting.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the lemon and the dryness of the wine.
Club soda
Adds carbonation, lightness and dilution to the chilled punch.

The step that matters

Add the chilled claret and club soda last. Carbonation escapes quickly when liquids are warm or stirred vigorously, so adding the chilled claret and club soda at the end, gently, keeps the punch lively and well cooled.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Peppermintfits better
  4. Mintthe original

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