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Drink

Paraguay Tea

A simple tea made by steeping yerba mate leaves in boiling water, optionally sweetened with burnt sugar or flavored with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Mate and lemon work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Paraguay Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Steep

  1. Place 2 tablespoons of yerba mate in a cup.

  2. Pour 1 cup of boiling water over the yerba mate.

  3. Allow it to steep for a few minutes.

Drink

  1. Drink shortly after making, using a bombilla or straw.

  2. Add burnt sugar or lemon juice if desired.

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. Mate + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Mate + sugartop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Yerba mate
Provides the tea's main flavor, with a mildly bitter, herbal character.
Boiling water
Extracts flavor and compounds from the coarse leaves during steeping.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mate, sugar. 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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