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Milk Punch to Keep

A preserved milk punch made with citrus, sugar, water, milk, and rum or brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Milk Punch to Keep

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 ↓

Milk Punch to Keep

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Pare the oranges and lemons as thin as possible and grate them to extract the flavor.

  2. Soak the peel in a bottle of rum or brandy for 24 hours, tightly sealed.

Make the punch

  1. Squeeze the fruit over 2 pounds of sugar.

  2. Add 4 quarts of water and 1 quart of boiling hot fresh milk.

  3. Stir in the rum, then strain through a jelly bag until clear.

  4. Bottle and cork it tightly immediately.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + rumtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together967 recipes

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

  3. Orange + rumtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together801 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Curdles acidic citrus juice, clarifying the punch and giving it a soft, smooth body.
Sugar
Sweetens the punch and balances the sharpness of the citrus juice.
Oranges and lemons
Provide acidity and aromatic oils from the juice and peel that flavor the punch.
Rum or brandy
Extracts flavor from the peel and adds alcohol that carries the aroma.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling hot milk. Hot milk poured into acidic citrus juice curdles and clears the liquid as proteins clump and are strained out. Milk added cold or too early may not clarify the punch properly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar, milk, rum. 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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