Name: Wormwood Wine
Ingredients: 1 ounce wormwood; 3 scruples gum; as much spikenard; 6 scruples balm; 3 scruples saffron; 180 gallons old wine

Why it works: Saffron and wine work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 282 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Wormwood Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Bruise the wormwood.
Mix with gum, spikenard, balm, and saffron.
Add the old wine.
Let the mixture stand for some time without heating.

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.

Saffron + winetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together282 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

Wormwood: Provides the bitter, herbal flavour that defines the wine.
Old wine: Serves as the liquid base that carries and extracts the other flavours.
Saffron: Adds aroma and a distinctive golden colour to the liquid.
Gum: Adds body and a slightly thicker mouthfeel to the wine.

“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.