Skip to main content
Drink

A Most Pleasant Drink

A drink made with cranberries, water, oatmeal, lemon peel, sugar, and sherry, boiled and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and sherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,273 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

A Most Pleasant Drink

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mash the cranberries in a cup of water.

  2. Boil 2 quarts of water with oatmeal and lemon peel.

Make the punch

  1. Add the mashed cranberries and sugar to the boiling water.

  2. Stir in the sherry and boil for 30 minutes.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the mixture 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 + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + sherrytop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,141 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Lemon and sugar 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

Cranberries
Provide tartness, body and the punch's red colour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tart cranberries.
Sherry
Adds its own flavour and aroma to the punch.
Lemon peel
Adds a fragrant citrus aroma.

The step that matters

Boiling the sherry for 30 minutes. Long boiling drives off much of the sherry's alcohol and its delicate aromas, so the punch can taste flatter and more cooked than the sherry alone would. Adding the sherry is the step where flavour is most easily lost.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, sherry. 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.

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes