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Horehound Drops

A medicinal drop made from horehound tea, sugar, glucose, honey, and optional spinach for color.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and honey work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 103 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Horehound Drops

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tea

  1. Boil 1 lb of horehound tea in 1 gallon of water to make tea.

  2. Strain the liquid.

Cook the drops

  1. In a pot, combine the strained tea with 2 cups of sugar and ½ cup of glucose.

  2. Boil the mixture as you would for peppermint drops.

  3. Add 1 pint of honey.

  4. If desired, add a little spinach green for color, ensuring it is non-poisonous.

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. Tea + honeytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together103 recipes

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

  2. Tea + spinachtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Sugar + honeytop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,932 recipes

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

  4. Honey + spinachtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Tea + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,204 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Horehound tea
Provides the bitter, herbal flavor that defines the drops.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and forms the hard, glassy candy structure as the syrup cooks.
Glucose
Inhibits sugar crystallization, keeping the candy smooth and less grainy.
Honey
Adds sweetness and aroma and helps resist crystallization in the finished drops.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup. The boil sets the drops' final hardness. Sugar concentration determines whether the candy sets hard or stays sticky, so the mixture must be cooked long enough to drive off enough water while avoiding scorching, which turns it bitter and dark.

Swap the spinach

The recipe marks spinach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tea, sugar, honey):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tea, sugar, honey. 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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