Name: Spirit of Violets
Ingredients: 4 ounces pulverized orris-root; 1 pint spirits of wine

Why it works: Spirit and wine 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 ↓

Spirit of Violets

Ingredients

4 ounces pulverized orris-root
1 pint spirits of wine

Directions

Infuse the orris-root in the spirits of wine for two weeks.
Filter the mixture through blotting paper.

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.

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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.

Spirit + winetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together701 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Orris-root: Provides the violet-like floral aroma that defines the liqueur.
Spirits of wine: Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour compounds from the orris-root.

“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.