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A Maraschino Punch

A punch made with water, sugar, citrus rinds, fruit, maraschino cherries, and ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

A Maraschino Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil 1 quart of water and 1 pound of sugar for 5 minutes.

  2. Add the grated rind of 2 lemons and 4 oranges to the syrup.

Assemble and serve

  1. Stir in 1 quart of cold water, 2 sliced tangerines, 1 sliced banana, ½ sliced pineapple, and 30 halved seeded grapes.

  2. Pour in 1 pint of maraschino cherries with their liquor.

  3. Use a solid block of ice with a bowl‑shaped hole in the center.

  4. Serve over a block of ice in a punch bowl.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Pineapple + grapetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together709 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Banana + grapetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

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

  5. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolves into the boiled water to make a sweet syrup that forms the punch base.
Maraschino cherries
Add sweetness and flavor through their syrupy liquor.
Citrus rind
Adds aromatic oils from the peel to the warm syrup, scenting the punch.

Swap the tangerine

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, orange, banana, pineapple, grape):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Tangerinethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, orange, banana, pineapple, grape. 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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