Why it works: Lavender and spirit work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓
Spirit of Lavender
Ingredients
Directions
Infuse the lavender flowers in the proof spirits.
Distill in a sand heat.
Repeat the infusion of fresh flowers four times.
Gather flowers very dry, strip from stalks, and keep in paper bags.
Alternatively, put 1.5 to 2 pounds of fresh lavender flowers into a still and add 1 gallon of proof spirit.
Distill off 1 gallon.
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.
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Lavender + spirittop 14% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together122 recipes
Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Fresh lavender flowers
- Supply the aromatic compounds that give the spirit its floral flavor and scent.
- Proof spirits
- Solvent that dissolves the flowers' aromatic oils during infusion and carries them through distillation.
The step that matters
Distill in a sand heat. Gentle, indirect heat from sand heats the still evenly and avoids scorching the charge, which would leave burnt, off-flavors in the distillate. Aromatic compounds are delicate and are best kept by steady, moderate heating.
“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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