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Drink

The Regent’s Punch

A citrus and tea-based punch with rum, arrack, brandy, pineapple syrup, and champagne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

The Regent’s Punch

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Peel the oranges and lemon as thin as possible.

  2. Infuse the peels in the syrup for an hour.

  3. Add the juice of the oranges and lemon to the syrup.

  4. Sweeten the tea and let it cool completely.

  5. Combine the cooled tea with the syrup and add all other ingredients.

Strain and chill

  1. Pass the mixture through a fine muslin sieve into a jug.

  2. Chill in ice until required.

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 + pineappletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Provide juice and aromatic oil from the peel for flavour and acidity.
Lemon
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the syrup.
Green tea
Adds mild astringency and a tannic backbone to the punch.
French brandy
Adds alcoholic warmth and depth of flavour.
Champagne
Adds carbonation and lightness to the finished punch.

The step that matters

Peel the citrus as thin as possible. Citrus peel holds aromatic oils and bitter pith. Thin peeling captures the fragrance while keeping the white pith, which tastes bitter, out of the syrup.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, syrup, green tea, sugar, rum, brandy, pineapple):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, syrup, green tea, sugar, rum, brandy, pineapple. 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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