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Drink

Punch, Liqueurs, Syrups, Etc

A fermented ginger and lemon drink made with yeast and boiled water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Punch, Liqueurs, Syrups, Etc

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grate the ginger and combine it with the lemon juice and peel in a large pan.

  2. Add the cream of tartar and pour in the boiling water.

Ferment

  1. Cover the pan and let it cool nearly to room temperature.

  2. Once cooled, place the yeast on a piece of toast and add it to the mixture.

  3. Leave to ferment for 2 days.

Bottle

  1. Strain the mixture and bottle it in small stone bottles, securing the corks tightly with wire.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + creamtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Lemon + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Lemon and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,640 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

Ginger
Provides the main aroma and spicy flavour of the drink.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbonation and the drink's fizz and alcohol.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances sweetness.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity and helps stabilise the mixture during fermentation.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool nearly to room temperature before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed or weakened by very hot liquid. Cooling the mixture first keeps the yeast alive so it can ferment properly and produce fizz.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ginger, cream):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, cream. 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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