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Drink

Cornella or Cinnamon

A spiced brandy liqueur made by infusing cinnamon, cloves, coriander, and salt, clarifying sugar, adding beaten egg whites, and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove 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 ↓

Cornella or Cinnamon

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse and distill

  1. Mix the cinnamon, cloves, coriander seeds, and coarse sea salt in the brandy.

  2. Let the mixture infuse for 18 hours.

  3. Distill as much as possible from the mixture.

Make the syrup and clarify

  1. Clarify 2 pounds of sugar in 2.5 bottles of water.

  2. Beat the egg whites.

  3. Mix the beaten egg whites with the spirit.

  4. Filter the mixture through blotting paper.

Bottle

  1. Cork the bottles well after mixing.

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 + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + coriandertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,635 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Clove + coriandertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,221 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Cinnamon + brandytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,199 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

Brandy
Serves as the base spirit that extracts and carries the spice flavours.
Cinnamon
Contributes warm, sweet aroma and flavour to the spirit during infusion.
Cloves
Adds strong, pungent aroma that infuses into the brandy over time.
Coriander seeds
Adds citrusy, floral aroma to the spiced spirit.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and body to balance the strong spirit and spices.
Egg whites
Coagulate and trap fine particles so filtering leaves the spirit clear.

The step that matters

Mix the beaten egg whites with the spirit. Egg white proteins coagulate and bind fine sediment into particles that the filter can catch. The whites must be evenly blended through the mixture before filtering, or cloudy particles pass through and the spirit stays hazy.

Swap the coriander

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cinnamon, clove, brandy, sugar, egg):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Corianderthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cinnamon, clove, brandy, sugar, egg. 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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