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Drink

Claret Punch

A punch made with claret, lemon, sugar, soda, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Red wine and clove work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 849 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Claret Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the punch

  1. Cut the yellow part of the lemon and soak it in ½ quart of claret for 3 to 4 hours.

  2. Add the remaining claret to the mixture.

  3. Sweeten to taste with sugar.

  4. Add 1 bottle of soda.

Serve

  1. Place a clove in each glass before pouring out the punch.

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. Red wine + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  4. Lemon + red winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together779 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Claret
Provides the main wine flavour, colour and body of the punch.
Lemon peel
Its yellow zest, steeped in the wine, adds aromatic oils and a bright citrus note.
Sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the acidity of the wine and lemon.
Soda
Adds carbonation, lightening the texture and making the punch fizzy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (red wine, sugar, clove):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against red wine, sugar, clove. 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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