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Essence of Absinthe

A distilled absinthe concentrate made by macerating absinthe with juniper, cinnamon, and angelica root.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and angelica share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 80 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Essence of Absinthe

Ingredients

Directions

Macerate

  1. Macerate the absinthe, juniper, cinnamon, and angelica root for twelve days.

Distill

  1. Distill the mixture to draw off 3.5 L of the product.

  2. Redistill slowly to obtain 3.5 L of the final product.

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. Cinnamon + angelicatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together80 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Absinthe
Supplies the characteristic bitter herbal flavour that defines the final spirit.
Juniper
Adds resinous, piney aroma that gives the spirit its distinctive character.
Ceylon cinnamon
Contributes warm, sweet aromatic notes that round out the botanical blend.
Angelica root
Adds earthy, musky aroma that deepens the herbal profile.
Alcohol
Acts as the solvent that extracts aromatic compounds from the botanicals during maceration.

The step that matters

Redistill slowly. Slow distillation lets the volatile aromatics separate cleanly, so the early and late fractions are trimmed and the spirit tastes smoother and more balanced. Rushing the run can carry harsh, off-flavoured compounds into the final product.

“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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