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Milk Punch

A drink made with lemon rind-infused brandy, sugar, water, nutmeg, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Milk Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Steep the rinds of 9 lemons in 2 quarts of brandy for 18 hours.

  2. Mix the strained juice of the lemons, 1.5 pounds of sugar, and 5 pints of water.

  3. Add 1 grated nutmeg to the mixture.

Finish and strain

  1. Boil 1 quart of new milk and add it to the mixture.

  2. Strain through a jelly bag before serving.

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 + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Brandy + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Brandy + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,738 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemon rinds
Infused into the brandy, they add aromatic oils and bright citrus flavour.
Brandy
Extracts flavour from the lemon rinds and acts as the spirit base of the punch.
Sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the acidity of the lemon juice.
New milk
Its proteins curdle with the acid, and straining removes the solids, leaving the punch clearer and softer.
Nutmeg
Contributes warm, aromatic spice notes to the punch.

The step that matters

Boil the milk before adding it. Boiling denatures the milk proteins so they coagulate into curds that the jelly bag can strain out, rather than clouding the drink unpredictably.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against brandy, sugar, nutmeg, milk. 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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