Skip to main content
Drink

Health Drink

A boiled beverage of tamarinds, cranberries, raisins, and water, finished with lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tamarind and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 170 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Health Drink

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil tamarinds, cranberries, and stoned raisins in water until reduced to 2 pints.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Add a bit of lemon peel and remove it after 1 hour to avoid bitterness.

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. Tamarind + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Tamarind + raisintop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Tamarinds
Provides the sour, tangy flavour that defines the drink.
Cranberries
Adds tartness and a bright colour to the drink.
Raisins
Adds gentle sweetness and body to balance the sourness.

The step that matters

Removing the lemon peel after 1 hour. Citrus peel releases bitter compounds the longer it steeps in liquid, so leaving it in too long makes the drink taste bitter.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tamarind, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tamarind, 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.

You might also like

Raisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesTamarind MilkTamarind Milk12 recipes