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Drink

For Punch or Puddings

An orange punch made by boiling orange juice with sugar, then cooling and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

For Punch or Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Squeeze the oranges and strain the juice into a large pot.

Boil, skim and bottle

  1. Boil the juice with 1½ pounds of sugar for each pint of juice.

  2. Skim the mixture well and let it cool.

  3. Bottle the mixture and cork it tightly.

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 + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Oranges
Supply the juice, which provides the main flavour and bright acidity.
Fine sugar
Sweetens the juice and, at this concentration, helps the punch keep.

The step that matters

Skim the mixture well. Foam and scum rising during boiling carry impurities that would cloud the punch and can spoil it if left in the bottled liquid.

“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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