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Drink

Assenzio

A homemade absinthe made by macerating leaves and cinnamon in wine spirit, then sweetened with a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Wine and spirit work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 701 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Assenzio

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse

  1. Combine the absinthe leaves and cinnamon in a bottle with the wine spirit.

  2. Let it macerate for 8 days, shaking the bottle once a day.

  3. Filter the mixture through a cloth.

Sweeten and bottle

  1. Prepare a syrup by cooking the sugar and water until clear.

  2. Cool the syrup and mix it with the filtered liquor.

  3. Bottle the mixture, seal tightly, and store in a cool place.

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. Wine + spirittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together701 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cinnamon + spirittop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Cinnamon + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,170 recipes

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

  5. Spirit + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

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

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

Green absinthe leaves
Provide the bitter, herbal flavour that defines the spirit.
Ceylon cinnamon
Adds warm, aromatic spice notes to the infusion.
Wine spirit
Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour from the leaves and cinnamon.
White sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the bitterness of the infused spirit.

The step that matters

Filter the mixture through a cloth. Leaving fine plant particles in the liquid can make it cloudy and keep extracting bitterness over time, so the filtering must be thorough before the syrup is added.

“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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