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Drink

Fruit Punch

A chilled beverage made from orange, lemon, pineapple juice, sugar syrup, ginger ale, and maraschino cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

Prepare the fruit

  1. Extract juice from the lemons.

  2. Pare the oranges closely and cut small pieces from between the partitions.

  3. Extract juice from the remaining orange pieces using a potato ricer.

  4. Pass the pineapple through a meat grinder.

Make the punch

  1. Mix all the juices and pour boiling water over the mixture.

  2. Reduce the sugar to a syrup and add it to the mixture.

  3. When cool, add the Maraschino cherries.

  4. Adjust the taste with ice water.

  5. Immediately before serving, add 2 to 3 pint bottles of ginger ale.

  6. You may add any desired fruits or preserved ginger passed through the grinder.

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. Orange + gingertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  4. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Pineapple + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together559 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolved into syrup to sweeten the punch and balance the citrus acidity.
Lemons
Supply sharp acidity and bright citrus flavour to the punch.
Oranges
Provide sweet citrus juice and aroma, plus small pieces of fruit.
Ginger ale
Adds carbonation and mild spice, lightening the body when added just before serving.

The step that matters

Immediately before serving, add the ginger ale. Ginger ale is carbonated, and its bubbles escape quickly once poured into a mixture or left standing. Adding it last keeps the punch fizzy and lively rather than flat.

Swap the pineapple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar, lemon, ginger):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Blackberryfits about as well
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar, lemon, ginger. 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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