Skip to main content
Drink

Punch

A spiced tea punch made with black tea, clove, cinnamon, lemon rind, rum or brandy, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the spices

  1. In a crockery pot, combine black tea, clove, cinnamon, and lemon rind.

  2. Pour boiling water over the mixture and let it steep for 5 minutes, then strain.

Burn the spirit and serve

  1. In a separate crockery vessel, place the rum or brandy and loaf sugar.

  2. Ignite the rum or brandy and let it burn until the flame extinguishes.

  3. Mix the strained tea with the burnt rum or brandy and serve cold or warm.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Black tea + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together48 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Rum or brandy
Provides the main alcoholic body and aroma, and the burning changes its flavour.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the strong alcohol and tea.
Black tea
Adds tannins for a slight bitterness and astringency that offset the sugar.
Lemon rind
Contributes aromatic citrus oils that brighten the punch.

The step that matters

Igniting the rum or brandy. Burning the spirit with sugar caramelises the sugar and cooks off some alcohol, changing the flavour. Let the flame burn fully before combining, since the flame must be extinguished safely and the spirit can flare if handled carelessly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (black tea, clove, cinnamon, rum, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against black tea, clove, cinnamon, rum, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesCinnamon TinctureCinnamon Tincture10 recipes