Name: Nutmeg Extract
Ingredients: 2 nutmegs; ½ cup gin

Why it works: Nutmeg and gin work together. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 31 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Nutmeg Extract

Ingredients

2 nutmegs
½ cup gin

Directions

Grate or pound the nutmegs.
Place the grated nutmegs in a bottle.
Add ½ cup of gin for each nutmeg.

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.

Nutmeg + gintop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together31 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Nutmegs: Provide the main aroma and flavour, released from the grated or pounded spice.
Gin: Acts as a solvent, drawing aromatic compounds out of the nutmeg.

“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.