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Drink

Fruit Punch

Fruit Punch is a chilled beverage made with citrus, tropical fruit, syrup, and optional wine.

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 ↓

Fruit Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Juice 6 lemons and set the juice aside.

  2. Peel and cut up the remaining 6 lemons, 12 oranges, and 1 pineapple.

  3. Combine all the cut fruits in a large bowl.

Macerate and serve

  1. Make a thick syrup by dissolving sugar in water and let it cool.

  2. Pour the cooled syrup over the fruit and let it stand for about 10 hours.

  3. Before serving, add water and ice to the fruit mixture.

  4. If desired, stir in 1 pint of claret or any light wine.

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. Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

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

  5. Pineapple + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolved into the syrup to sweeten the punch and balance the citrus acidity.
Lemons
Provide the main acidity and bright citrus flavour of the punch.
Oranges
Add sweetness, citrus aroma and juicy body to the fruit base.
Pineapple
Adds tropical sweetness and juicy fruit flavour to the mixture.

The step that matters

Letting the fruit stand in the syrup. Standing for about 10 hours lets the sugar syrup draw flavour and juice out of the cut fruit, so the punch tastes of the fruit rather than of plain sugared water.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, banana, pineapple, sugar, wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, banana, pineapple, sugar, wine. 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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