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Drink

A Good Punch

A punch made with claret, brandy, sugar, Curaçao, citrus peel, mace, cucumber, and mint, steeped overnight.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

A Good Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse

  1. Soak the orange and lemon peels with the mace in the brandy overnight.

  2. Add the cucumber slices and let them soak for 5 minutes.

  3. Add fresh mint and let it soak for 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve in a punch bowl.

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. Lemon + minttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,998 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Cucumber + minttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together884 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Orange + minttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together549 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Lemon + cucumbertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,067 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Brandy
Extracts aromatic oils from the peels and mace, giving the punch its warmth and body.
Claret
Forms the wine base, providing most of the liquid volume and fruity, tannic character.
Orange and lemon peel
Supplies aromatic citrus oils that flavour the punch during soaking.
Fresh mint
Adds a cool, aromatic herbal note to the punch.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (brandy, sugar, orange, lemon, cucumber, mint):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Peppermintfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against brandy, sugar, orange, lemon, cucumber, mint. 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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