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Neapolitan Punch

A citrus punch made with lemon slices, orange juice, sugar, cloves, cinnamon, raisins, and Buffalo Lithia water.

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

Neapolitan Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the lemons into very thin slices.

  2. Add the juice and pulp of the oranges.

  3. Stir in the loaf sugar, cloves, cinnamon, and chopped raisins.

  4. Pour over 2 gallons of Buffalo Lithia water.

Steep and bottle

  1. Stir daily for 5 days.

  2. Strain and bottle the mixture.

Serve

  1. Serve with cracked ice.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  3. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  4. Orange + cinnamontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Orange + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Provide sharp acidity and aromatic citrus oils that flavour the punch.
Oranges
Add juice and pulp for sweetness, body and fruity acidity.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity of the citrus.
Seeded raisins
Add sweetness and body as they soften and release their flavour into the liquid.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, orange, sugar, clove, cinnamon, buffalo. 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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