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Temperance Punch

A citrus and cranberry punch flavored with water and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Temperance Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juices

  1. Juice the lemons and oranges.

  2. Heat the cranberries until the juice is easily extracted.

Combine and sweeten

  1. Cool the cranberry juice and combine it with the lemon and orange juice.

  2. Add water and sugar to taste.

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

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

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

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

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

Lemons
Provides sharp acidity that brightens the punch and balances sweetness.
Oranges
Adds natural sweetness and citrus aroma, rounding out the sour notes.
Cranberries
Contribute tartness, colour and body to the juice.

The step that matters

Heating the cranberries. Heat softens the berries' cell walls so their juice releases easily. Heating until they just burst gives good juice yield, while heating far beyond that is unnecessary for extraction.

“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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