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Drink

Milk Punch

A chilled beverage made with citrus zest, sugar, rum, brandy, water, and hot milk.

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 ↓

Milk Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peels

  1. Pare the oranges and lemons as thin as possible.

  2. Grate the peels with lump sugar to extract the flavor.

  3. Steep the peels in a quart of rum and a pint of brandy in a closed container for 24 hours.

Make the punch

  1. Squeeze the juice from the fruit into a large bowl with 2 pounds of sugar.

  2. Add 4 quarts of water and 1 quart of boiling hot milk to the bowl.

  3. Stir in the rum and brandy mixture.

  4. Strain the mixture through a jelly bag until clear.

Bottle and store

  1. Bottle and cork immediately.

  2. Store; it will keep for several weeks.

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. Rum + brandytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,058 recipes

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

  3. Rum + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together967 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Their peel and juice supply the primary citrus aroma and bright flavor.
Lemons
Their juice adds acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the punch and draws flavor from the peels when grated with them.
Rum
Carries the flavor of the steeped peels and preserves the punch.
Brandy
Adds depth and aroma to the steeped spirit base.
Milk
Its proteins curdle with the acid, which clarifies the punch when strained.

The step that matters

Strain the mixture through a jelly bag until clear. Adding hot milk to acidic citrus juice curdles its proteins, which then trap solids and cloud the liquid. A fine jelly bag removes the curds so the punch runs clear, and straining slowly lets the clarification complete.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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