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Drink

A Good Drink for the Lungs

A drink made from Irish moss steeped in boiling water, flavored with lemon juice and optional sweeteners.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Irish moss and vanilla share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Good Drink for the Lungs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the Irish moss thoroughly.

  2. Place the moss in a pitcher and pour boiling water over it.

Make the tonic

  1. Keep the mixture at boiling point for 2 hours without boiling.

  2. Strain the mixture and add the juice of one lemon.

  3. Sweeten to taste, or add vanilla, wine, or nutmeg if preferred.

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. Irish moss + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Irish moss + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together61 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,961 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

Irish moss
Releases gelling compounds into the water, thickening the liquid as it steeps.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Sweetener
Adds sweetness to balance the tart lemon and mossy flavour.

The step that matters

Keeping the mixture hot for 2 hours. Sustained gentle heat is what draws the gelling compounds out of the moss. Letting it roll at a hard boil can break the mixture up and make the tonic cloudy or uneven, so keep the heat controlled.

Swap the vanilla

The recipe marks vanilla as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (irish moss, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillathe original
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Avocadofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against irish moss, lemon. 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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