Skip to main content
Drink

Mint Punch

A chilled mint punch made with mint, lemon juice, sugar, ginger ale, and shaved ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mint and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,998 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Mint Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mint and lemon juice

  1. Chop the mint finely.

  2. Pound the powdered sugar with the juice of 2 lemons and let it stand for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.

  3. Strain the mixture, pressing hard to extract all the juice.

Assemble and serve

  1. Add the strained juice of 4 more lemons, a syrup made by boiling and chilling ½ cup sugar with 1 pint water, the sliced yellow rind of 2 lemons, and 6 sprigs of mint.

  2. Stir well, then add 1 quart of shaved ice and 2 bottles of ginger ale.

  3. Serve immediately.

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

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

  2. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  3. Mint + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together647 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mint
Provides the primary aromatic flavour that defines the punch.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves readily into the lemon juice, adding sweetness and body to the base.
Lemons
Supply acidity and fragrant oils from the juice and rind that balance the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup, balancing the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Ginger ale
Adds sweetness, carbonation and a spicy lift to the punch.

The step that matters

Pressing the mixture when straining. Pressing hard extracts the most juice and flavour from the mint and sugar mixture, but over-pressing can push bitter, pulpy material through the strainer and cloud the punch.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, ginger. 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.

More mint punch recipes

Frozen 3 See all 22 →

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesGinger PopGinger Pop22 recipesGinger WineGinger Wine12 recipes