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Drink

Ferder, or Milk Punch

A citrus-infused milk punch flavored with rum or brandy, sweetened with sugar, and strained for clarity.

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 ↓

Ferder, or Milk Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavouring

  1. Pare the oranges and lemons as thin as possible.

  2. Grate the peels after measuring the sugar to extract flavor.

  3. Steep the peels in a bottle of rum or brandy, stopper it tightly for 24 hours.

Make the punch

  1. Squeeze the fruit into a bowl with the sugar.

  2. Add 4 quarts of water and 1 quart of boiling hot milk to the mixture.

  3. Stir in the rum or brandy mixture.

  4. Strain through a jelly bag until perfectly clear.

  5. Bottle and cork immediately.

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. Milk + rumtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together967 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  3. Orange + rumtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together801 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Peel and juice supply aromatic oils and tart citrus flavour.
Lemons
Juice adds acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the acidity of the citrus.
New milk
Milk proteins curdle with the acid and are filtered out, leaving a clearer, softer drink.
Rum or brandy
Carries the aromatic oils from the peels and adds alcohol warmth.

The step that matters

Strain through a jelly bag until perfectly clear. Adding hot milk to acidic citrus curdles its proteins into solid curds. Straining through a fine jelly bag removes these curds, so the punch becomes clear rather than cloudy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar, milk, rum. 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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