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Fever Drink

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and flaxseed share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68 recipes. Both carry 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol, which smells clove, smoky. The science ↓

Fever Drink

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pour cold water over wheat bran and boil for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture and add sugar and lemon juice.

  3. Pour boiling water over flaxseed and let it sit until it becomes ropy.

  4. Combine the flaxseed mixture with the hot lemonade and drink.

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. Wheat + flaxseedtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together68 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  2. Lemon + flaxseedtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together151 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Wheat + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together585 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Wheat + sugartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,071 recipes

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

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wheat, sugar, flaxseed):

  1. Blueberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wheat, sugar, flaxseed. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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