Name: Orgeat
Ingredients: 1 quart milk; 1 piece stick cinnamon; 4 ounces sweet almonds; ½ cup sugar (more or less to taste)

Why it works: Cinnamon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Orgeat

Ingredients

1 quart milk
1 piece stick cinnamon
4 ounces sweet almonds
½ cup sugar (more or less to taste)

Directions

Infuse the milk

Put a piece of stick cinnamon in a quart of milk and boil.
Let it cool and remove the cinnamon.

Make the almond mixture

Blanch and reduce 4 ounces of sweet almonds to a paste.
Mix the almond paste with the milk and add ½ cup of sugar.
Boil for 3 to 5 minutes.

Strain and serve

Strain through a fine strainer or sieve and serve in glasses, either warm or cold.

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.

Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,514 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,655 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Milk + almondtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,800 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15,679 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

What each ingredient does

Milk: Forms the liquid base and carries the flavor and body of the syrup.
Sweet almonds: Provide the nutty flavor and creamy body once ground into a paste.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps give the syrup its thick, smooth texture.
Stick cinnamon: Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor to the milk.

“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.