Name: Rose Water
Ingredients: 2 coffee cups rain water; 8-10 drops attar of roses; 1 spoonful pulverized magnesia

Why it works: Coffee and rose work together. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 56 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Rose Water

Ingredients

2 coffee cups rain water
8-10 drops attar of roses
1 spoonful pulverized magnesia

Directions

Make the rose water

Combine rain water and attar of roses in a bowl.
Stir in pulverized magnesia carefully.
Filter the mixture through filtering paper.

Bottle

Pour the filtered rose water into bottles and cork them.
Rinse the rose jar with rose water before filling it with prepared petals.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Coffee + rosetop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together56 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

Rain water: Forms the liquid base that carries the rose aroma.
Attar of roses: Provides the concentrated rose aroma and flavour.
Pulverized magnesia: Helps settle impurities so the filtered liquid comes out clearer.

“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.