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Drink

The Rechabite Loving Cup

A punch made with black currant cordial, lemon cordial, honey, borage, verbena or lemon thyme, and zoedone.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and borage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 102 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

The Rechabite Loving Cup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the punch

  1. Mix the honey with the lemon cordial.

  2. Add the black currant cordial.

  3. Put the mixture in a punch bowl with the borage and lemon thyme.

  4. Let it stand for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Pour in the bottles of zoedone and serve at once.

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. Lemon + boragetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together102 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  2. Black currant + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together53 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + honeytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,707 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Black currant + boragetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1 recipe

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Black currant + honeytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currant cordial
Provides the main fruity flavour and sweetness of the punch.
Lemon cordial
Adds bright acidity that balances the sweetness of the cordials.
Honey
Adds sweetness and a rounded, mellow body to the cordial base.
Zoedone
Adds fizz and a light, sparkling body when poured in at the end.

Swap the borage

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Peppermintfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Boragethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against black currant, lemon, honey. 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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