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Drink

Fruit Punch

Fruit Punch is a chilled drink made from orange and lemon juices, grated rinds, sugar, and 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 ↓

Fruit Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar, water, and fruit rinds for 5 minutes.

Add the juices

  1. Cool the mixture, then add the fruit juices; strain and chill.

Dilute and serve

  1. Dilute with chopped ice and ice water or carbonated water.

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. 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

Sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the sharp citrus acidity.
Lemon juice
Provides tartness and bright acidity that defines the punch's flavor.
Orange juice
Adds body and mellow fruit flavor with some sweetness and acidity.
Lemon rind
Boiling releases aromatic oils from the rind into the syrup, adding citrus aroma.
Orange rind
Boiling releases aromatic oils from the rind into the syrup, adding citrus aroma.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before adding the juices. Boiling extracts rind oils into the syrup, but heat dulls the fresh, volatile aromas of juice. Cooling the syrup first keeps the juices tasting bright and fresh rather than cooked and flat.

“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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