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Milk Punch

A citrus-based punch made with rum, brandy, sugar, water, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Milk Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavor base

  1. Pare the oranges and lemons as thin as possible.

  2. Grate the peels with lump sugar to extract the flavor.

  3. Steep the peels in a quart of rum and a pint of brandy in a closed container for 24 hours.

Make the punch

  1. Squeeze the fruit over 2 pounds of sugar.

  2. Add 4 quarts of water and 1 quart of boiling hot new milk.

  3. Stir in the rum and brandy mixture.

  4. Strain through a jelly bag until perfectly clear.

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

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

  2. Rum + brandytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,058 recipes

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

  3. Rum + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together967 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  4. Orange + rumtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together801 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges and lemons
Their peel supplies aromatic oils and their juice adds acidity and brightness.
Rum and brandy
Spirits extract flavor from the peel and preserve the finished punch.
Lump sugar
Sugar draws oils out of the peel when grated and sweetens the punch.
New milk
Boiling milk curdles with the acid, and straining removes the solids, leaving the punch clear and softer.

The step that matters

Add the boiling hot milk to the acidic citrus mixture. Hot milk meeting citrus acid curdles into solids that cloud the punch. Straining through a jelly bag then removes these solids to produce the clear result the recipe requires.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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