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Drink

Fruit Punch

Fruit Punch is a chilled beverage made with pineapple, sugar, water, tea, citrus juices, fruit juice, cherries, and sparkling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

Fruit Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil the grated pineapple, sugar, and water for 20 minutes.

  2. Add the strong tea and strain the mixture.

Assemble and serve

  1. When cold, stir in the lemon juice, orange juice, fruit juice, maraschino cherries, and water.

  2. Add a large piece of ice before serving.

  3. Serve with Apollinaris water or ginger ale, and garnish with mint leaves or pieces of fruit if desired.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Pineapple + strawberrytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together433 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Orange + gingertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Adds fruity flavour and aroma to the syrup base.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and body to the syrup base.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the punch and balances the sweetness.
Orange juice
Adds sweetness, fruity acidity, and aroma to the punch.
Strong tea
Contributes tannins for a slightly astringent, savoury depth of flavour.

The step that matters

Cool the syrup before adding the juices. Adding citrus and fruit juices to a hot syrup can dull their fresh aroma and flavour. Chilling the base first keeps the punch bright and lets the flavours blend cleanly.

Swap the pineapple

The recipe marks pineapple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, tea, lemon, orange, strawberry, ginger, mint):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Blackberryfits about as well
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, tea, lemon, orange, strawberry, ginger, 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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