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Another Way to Make Milk Punch

A fortified milk punch made with brandy, citrus peels, sugar, water, and boiling milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Another Way to Make Milk Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse and prepare

  1. Infuse the peel of the oranges and lemons in the brandy for 12 hours.

  2. Boil the water and sugar together, then let it cool.

Combine and clarify

  1. Strain the juice from the oranges and lemons into the cooled mixture.

  2. Combine the strained mixture with the infused brandy in a cask.

  3. Pour in the boiling milk, seal the cask, and let it stand until fine.

Age and bottle

  1. For best results, allow it to age in the cask for a year before bottling.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Brandy + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Orange + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

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

  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

Brandy
Carries the citrus oils from the peel and forms the spirit base of the punch.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body, balancing the alcohol and the citrus acidity.
Boiling milk
Binds with particles in the liquid so they settle out, clarifying the punch.
Seville oranges
Provide bitter aromatic oil from the peel and acidic juice for flavour.
Lemons
Add acidity and bright citrus aroma from the peel and juice.

The step that matters

Pour in the boiling milk and let it stand. Milk proteins coagulate and trap suspended particles as they settle, clearing the punch. Adding milk when it is not hot enough, or stirring the cask afterwards, can leave the punch cloudy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against brandy, orange, sugar, 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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