Skip to main content
Drink

Creme De Menthe Punch

A chilled mint-flavored punch made with water, sugar, lemon juice, crème de menthe cordial, and vegetable color paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Creme De Menthe Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil water and sugar for 20 minutes.

  2. Let the mixture cool, then add lemon juice.

Freeze and finish

  1. Freeze the mixture until it reaches a sherbet consistency.

  2. Tint the frozen mixture light green with vegetable color paste.

  3. Just before serving, beat in the crème de menthe cordial.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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 lowers the freezing point, helping keep it scoopable rather than rock-hard.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and brightens the flavor.
Crème de menthe cordial
Provides the mint flavor and aroma that defines the punch.

The step that matters

Freeze to sherbet consistency. Sugar and water form a syrup that freezes into ice crystals; stopping at the sherbet stage keeps the texture soft and spoonable. Freezing too long makes it hard and icy.

“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

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes