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Drink

Tea Punch

A chilled tea beverage flavored with cherry phosphate, lemon juice, and optional sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and lemon 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

Make the tea

  1. Brew a strong tea using high quality leaves.

  2. Let the tea cool and strain it over a large block of ice.

Sweeten and finish

  1. Add sugar to taste.

  2. For each pint of tea, mix in ⅓ cup of Cherry phosphate and the juice of ¼ lemon.

  3. Optionally, add a small amount of sherry 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. Tea + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

  2. Cherry + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,301 recipes

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

  3. Tea + cherrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together47 recipes

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

  4. Cherry + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  5. Tea + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together63 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

What each ingredient does

Tea
Provides the main flavor and a light astringency that balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tea's bitterness and the tartness of the citrus.
Cherry phosphate
Adds cherry flavor and tart acidity to the punch.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and keeps the punch from tasting flat.

Swap the cherry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tea, sugar, lemon, sherry):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tea, sugar, lemon, sherry. 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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