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Drink

Virginia Verder, or Bottled Milk-punch

A punch made with oranges, lemons, sugar, water, milk, and brandy, steeped and strained.

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 ↓

Virginia Verder, or Bottled Milk-punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the infusion

  1. Thinly cut the yellow rind from the oranges and lemons.

  2. Steep the rind in a bottle of brandy for 24 hours.

Make the punch

  1. Squeeze the juice from the fruit, removing seeds, onto the sugar.

  2. Add the water and boiling hot milk to the sugar and juice mixture.

  3. Stir in the brandy.

  4. Strain the mixture through a jelly bag until clear.

Bottle and store

  1. Bottle and cork it air-tight, then store in a cool place.

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. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Orange + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Orange + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Milk + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,738 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Supply juice and aromatic oil from the rind for flavour and brightness.
Lemons
Add acidity that balances the sweetness and lifts the citrus flavour.
White sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the acidity of the citrus.
Milk
Softens the sharp citrus and gives the punch a smooth, mellow body.
Brandy
Extracts flavour from the rind and acts as the spirit base that keeps the punch stable.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling hot milk. Hot milk curdles when it meets acidic citrus juice, so the milk should be added to the sugar and juice mixture as the record describes, and the mixture then strained until clear to remove the curds.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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