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Drink

Vendor, or Millp Punch

A citrus punch made with oranges, lemons, sugar, rum or brandy, optional porter, and boiling water.

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 ↓

Vendor, or Millp Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavors

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

  2. Grate the peels with sugar to extract the flavor.

  3. Steep the peels in a bottle of rum or brandy.

  4. Squeeze the lemon juice onto the sugar and mix well with a bruiser.

Make the punch

  1. Combine the sugar mixture with boiling water until cool.

  2. Add equal parts rum and brandy to the mixture and stir well.

  3. Strain the mixture if desired to remove pulp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Lemon + rumtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Sugar
Sweetens the punch and helps draw oils out of the citrus peel.
Rum or brandy
Carries citrus aroma and adds alcohol strength and warmth to the punch.
Lemons
Provide sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Oranges
Supply aromatic peel oils and sweet citrus flavor.

The step that matters

Grate the peels with sugar to extract the flavor.. Citrus flavor oils sit in the outer peel, and rubbing it with sugar draws them out. Peel that is pared too thick adds bitter pith, so paring thinly matters.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar, 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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