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Drink

Cider Cup

A chilled cider beverage mixed with club soda, sugar, fruit slices, and mint.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cider and mint work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 115 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Cider Cup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fill a pitcher with cracked ice.

  2. Pour 1 quart of cider over the ice.

  3. Add 1 teaspoon of sugar and 1 bottle of club soda.

  4. Decorate the top with thinly sliced fruits and a bunch of young mint.

  5. 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. Cider + minttop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together115 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Cider + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sugar + minttop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cider
Provides the main liquid and the apple flavour that carries the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the cider.
Club soda
Adds carbonation, giving the drink lightness and a fizzy bite.

The step that matters

Adding the club soda. Carbonation is lost quickly once bubbles escape, so the club soda should go in just before serving and the drink should be served immediately.

Swap the mint

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, 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.

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