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Drink

Flowing Iced Punch

A chilled punch made with lemon juice, sugar, tea, champagne, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and tea work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 610 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Flowing Iced Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil the sugar with 2 cups of water until dissolved.

  2. Add the lemon juice and grated peel of 8 lemons.

  3. Boil the tea with 1 pint of water, then strain it through a sieve.

  4. Combine the tea mixture with the lemon mixture and freeze in a large container.

Finish and serve

  1. Once frozen hard, gradually add the champagne.

  2. Finally, add the cream and serve in champagne glasses.

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 + teatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Lemon + champagnetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

  5. Champagne + teatop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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
Dissolved in water to make a syrup that sweetens the punch and softens its tartness.
Lemon juice
Provides the sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the syrup.
Tea
Adds tannins for a light astringency and aroma to the punch.
Champagne
Adds sparkling carbonation and a dry, fruity aroma when mixed in after freezing.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body that softens the acidity.

The step that matters

Gradually add the champagne to the frozen base. Champagne added to a frozen mixture loses carbonation quickly if poured in all at once or allowed to melt the base unevenly. Adding it gradually keeps the texture slushy and the bubbles lively.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, champagne, cream, tea):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, champagne, cream, tea. 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.

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