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Drink

Tea Punch

A chilled punch made with lemon ice cream, tea, egg whites, syrup, and optional brandy or kirsch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and tea work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 610 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Tea Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Prepare 1 quart of lemon ice cream and keep it frozen.

  2. In a saucepan, combine 1 cup sugar and ½ cup water. Heat to make a syrup.

  3. In a bowl, beat 3 egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  4. Gradually add the hot syrup to the egg whites while beating constantly until cool.

  5. Slowly mix in 1 quart of strong cold tea.

  6. Fold the tea mixture into the lemon ice cream.

Serve

  1. At serving time, add brandy or kirsch to taste.

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 + teatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Cream + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,635 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Egg + brandytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,340 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped with hot syrup to form a stable, airy foam that lightens the punch.
Sugar
Sweetens the punch and, dissolved into syrup, helps stabilize the meringue.
Lemon ice cream
Forms the frozen body of the punch and adds lemon flavour and creaminess.
Strong cold tea
Adds tannic, astringent flavour that balances the sweetness of the ice cream and syrup.

The step that matters

Adding the hot syrup to the egg whites. Pouring the syrup in slowly while beating constantly cooks and stabilizes the egg white foam. If it is added too fast or not beaten enough, the whites can deflate or form lumps instead of a smooth, stable foam.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sugar, egg, tea, brandy):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, egg, tea, 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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