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Victoria or 3½d Regiment Punch

A punch made with lemon peel, rum, sugar, brandy, water, and boiling milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rum and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,058 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Victoria or 3½d Regiment Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the rum

  1. Steep the lemon peel in 2 quarts of rum for 36 hours.

Make the punch

  1. Pour the lemon juice over 3½ pounds of loaf sugar.

  2. Add 2 quarts of brandy and 7 quarts of cold water; mix well.

  3. Gradually stir in 2 quarts of boiling milk.

  4. Let it stand for 4 hours.

Clarify and bottle

  1. Strain through a flannel jelly bag 2 or 3 times until clear.

  2. Bottle and cork tightly.

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

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

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

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

  3. Rum + sugartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Brandy + milktop 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

Lemon peel
Releases aromatic oils into the rum, flavouring the punch.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the acidity of the lemon juice.
Boiling milk
Curdles on contact with the acidic liquid, and its solids settle out so the strained punch clears.
Brandy
Adds alcohol and body, carrying the flavours of the spirits and lemon.

The step that matters

Gradually stir in the boiling milk. Adding the hot milk slowly lets the acidic citrus mixture curdle gently into fine solids rather than in large clumps. Those solids are what the later straining removes to leave the punch clear.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against rum, sugar, 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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