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Grape Juice Punch

A citrus and grape juice punch with sugar, water, and optional soda water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Grape Juice Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Squeeze the juice from the lemons, oranges, and grapefruit.

  2. Add the sugar and grape juice to the fruit juices and mix well.

Serve

  1. Add ice and then stir in the water.

  2. Optionally, use soda water instead of plain water.

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. Orange + grapefruittop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + grapefruittop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

  5. Grape + grapefruittop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together79 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-p-menthene-8-thiol (grapefruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Grape juice
Provides the main flavor and sweetness of the punch.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the citrus juices.
Lemons
Add acidity and bright citrus flavor.
Oranges
Add sweetness and citrus aroma along with juice volume.
Grapefruit
Adds a bitter citrus note and acidity to the punch.

Swap the grape

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

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

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