Skip to main content
Drink

For Punch or Puddings

A beverage made by boiling fresh orange juice with sugar and bottling it.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

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

  2. Boil the juice with 3 cups of sugar, skimming it well.

  3. Let it cool, then bottle 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

Fresh orange juice
Forms the main liquid and supplies the bright citrus flavour and acidity.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and balances its tartness.

The step that matters

Skimming the boiling juice. Boiling draws foam and bits of pulp to the surface. Skimming them off keeps the punch clear and stops impurities from spoiling the flavour during storage.

“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.

You might also like

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipes