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Drink

Club Punch

A punch made with Burgundy wine, rum, brandy, Benedictine, Vichy water, citrus, pineapple, tea, and syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Club Punch

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Make a syrup by boiling water and sugar for 10 minutes.

  2. Mix remaining ingredients, except ice, and sweeten to taste with syrup.

  3. Pour into a punch bowl over a large piece of ice.

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. Rum + pineappletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Rum + brandytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,058 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the punch and, dissolved in boiling water, forms the syrup used to adjust sweetness.
Burgundy wine
Forms the wine base, adding body, tannin and fruity flavour to the punch.
Rum
Adds alcoholic strength and warm, aromatic depth to the punch.
Vichy water
Adds carbonation, giving the punch a lively, bubbly lift.
Lemon juice
Provides acidity that balances the sweetness of the syrup and fruit.
Sliced oranges
Contribute fresh citrus aroma, flavour and acidity to the punch.

The step that matters

Sweeten to taste with syrup. Sugar dissolves fully in the boiled syrup, so it blends evenly. Adding it gradually lets you balance sweetness against the wine, acid and sugar already in the fruit and pineapple.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, wine, rum, brandy, orange, pineapple, syrup. 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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