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Bordeaux Punch

A punch made with claret, sugar, cinnamon, orange and lemon juices, orange and lemon slices, mint, and sifted sugar.

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 ↓

Bordeaux Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the punch

  1. In a saucepan, combine claret, sugar, cinnamon, orange juice, and lemon juice.

  2. Heat the mixture until it reaches boiling point.

  3. Pour the hot mixture into a bowl.

Garnish and serve

  1. Add the orange slices, lemon slices, and mint.

  2. Sprinkle with sifted sugar and serve hot.

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. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Claret
Forms the wine base that gives the punch its body and main flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the acidity of the citrus juices.
Orange juice
Adds bright acidity and fruity sweetness to the wine base.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the wine and balances sweetness.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma that infuses into the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Heat the mixture until it reaches boiling point. Heating extracts aroma from the cinnamon and dissolves the sugar fully, but boiling drives off alcohol and can make citrus taste flat or bitter, so the mixture should be heated only until it is hot.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon, orange, lemon. 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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