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Punch a LA Ford

A punch made with lemon peel, sugar, water, cognac, and rum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cognac brandy and rum share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68 recipes. Both carry 2-methoxy-4-propylphenol, which smells allspice, anise. The science ↓

Punch a LA Ford

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Peel the lemons very thin.

  2. Place the lemon peels in a large bowl.

  3. Add the sugar and stir with a wooden spoon for about 30 minutes to extract the essential oil.

  4. Pour boiling water over the peels and stir until the sugar dissolves.

Make the juice

  1. Cut the lemons in half and squeeze out the juice, straining out the seeds.

  2. Pour boiling water over the lemon juice and let it sit.

  3. Strain this water into the bowl with the peels.

  4. Add half the quantity of lemon juice to the mixture.

Finish and bottle

  1. Taste the mixture.

  2. Adjust the acidity or sweetness as needed.

  3. Strain the mixture until clear.

  4. Add 1 pint of cognac and 1 pint of old rum for every 3 quarts of punch.

  5. Bottle the punch 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. Cognac brandy + rumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together68 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-propylphenol (allspice, anise).

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

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

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

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

  4. Lemon + rumtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Lemon + cognac brandytop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together169 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Lemons
Supply the acidity and the aromatic oil from the peel that flavours the punch.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the punch and, stirred with the peels, draws out their essential oil.
Cognac brandy
Adds spirit strength and a warm, fruity aroma to the punch.
Old rum
Adds spirit strength and deeper caramel-like flavour to the punch.

The step that matters

Extracting the peel oil with sugar. Stirring sugar into the lemon peels rubs the oil out of the peel's surface cells. Peeling too thick adds bitter white pith, and skipping the stirring leaves the punch with a flat, weak citrus aroma.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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