Skip to main content
Drink

Milk Punch

A chilled drink made by infusing lime rinds in rum, then mixing with lime juice, sugar, nutmeg, water, and hot milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lime and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 236 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Milk Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the rum

  1. Place the lime rinds in a bottle of rum and let it stand for 24 hours.

Mix and clarify

  1. In a large container, mix the infused rum with water, lime juice, powdered sugar, and grated nutmegs.

  2. Add the boiling hot milk to the mixture and let it stand for 2 hours.

  3. Strain the mixture through a flannel bag.

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. Lime + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together236 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Rum + nutmegtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together646 recipes

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

  3. Lime + rumtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together412 recipes

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

  4. Rum + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together967 recipes

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

  5. Rum + sugartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Curdles on contact with the acidic lime juice, and the curds carry off impurities so the punch clears.
Lime juice
Provides acidity that balances the sugar and triggers the milk to curdle.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the sharpness of the lime and the strength of the rum.
Rum
Serves as the spirit base that carries the lime and nutmeg flavours.
Lime rinds
Infused into the rum to release aromatic citrus oils.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling hot milk. The milk must be added to the acidic mixture so it curdles; the curds then trap sediment and cloudy particles, which the straining removes to leave a clear punch. Letting it stand gives the curds time to settle.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Limethe original

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

More milk punch recipes

Rum 15Cambridge 9Hot 3 See all 169 →

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes