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Kitchen Pepper

A blend of ground ginger, black pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Kitchen Pepper

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl.

  2. Store the mixture in a tightly corked bottle.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Nutmeg + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Ground ginger
Adds warm, pungent aroma and spice flavour to the blend.
Ground cinnamon
Adds sweet, warm aroma that rounds out the spice blend.
Black pepper
Adds sharp, pungent heat that gives the blend its bite.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, sweet aroma to the spice blend.
Allspice
Adds a blended warm aroma reminiscent of several spices together.
Ground cloves
Adds strong, aromatic warmth in small amounts.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, clove):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Marjoramfits about as well
  3. Winter savoryfits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, clove. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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