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Tea Frappe

A chilled tea beverage made with oranges, lemons, pineapple, sugar, and brewed tea.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 Frappe

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tea

  1. Boil 1 pint of water.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the tea and let it steep for 5 minutes.

  3. Strain the tea, add the sugar and remaining water, then boil for 5 minutes.

Add the fruit and freeze

  1. Add the grated rind and juice of the oranges, the juice of the lemons, and the pineapple.

  2. Freeze the mixture and let it stand for 3 hours to ripen.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Tea + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

  4. Orange + teatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together333 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tea
Steeping releases the tea's flavour and aroma into the base liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the frozen mixture softer.
Oranges
Rind and juice add sweetness, citrus aroma and fruit flavour.
Lemons
Juice adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the frappé.
Pineapple
Adds fruit flavour and body from its juice and pulp.

The step that matters

Freezing and standing the mixture. Sugar lowers the freezing point, so the mixture forms a slushy texture rather than a solid block. Letting it stand afterward allows the flavours to meld and the texture to settle.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, tea, lemon, 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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