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Mint Punch

A chilled mint and lemon punch sweetened with sugar and flavored with apollinaris.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Mint and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,998 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Mint Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mint syrup

  1. Strip the leaves from the mint stalks and chop them very fine.

  2. Rub the chopped mint into a paste, gradually adding 1 pint of cold water.

  3. Add 1 pound of sugar and boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Strain the mixture through cheesecloth and let it cool.

Finish and serve

  1. Once cool, add the juice of 6 lemons.

  2. Serve in a punch bowl over a block of ice, adding a few mint leaves and enough apollinaris to taste.

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. Mint + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,998 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Mint + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mint
Provides the main aroma and fresh herbal flavour of the punch.
Sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Lemons
Adds acidity and brightness that cut through the sugar.

The step that matters

Rub the chopped mint into a paste, gradually adding the water. Crushing the mint breaks open its leaf cells so the oils and flavour release into the water. Adding the water gradually keeps the paste loose enough to rub evenly, so the flavour is drawn out thoroughly rather than left clinging to the leaves.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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