Name: Dandelion and Parsley Tea
Ingredients: 6 dandelion roots; 6 parsley roots; 1 pint boiling water; a little coarse sea salt (optional); a little saltpetre (optional)

Why it works: Dandelion and parsley share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Dandelion and Parsley Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Wash and scrape the dandelion and parsley roots.

Infuse and season

Pour boiling water over the roots.
Let it infuse for 3 hours near the fire.
Add a little coarse sea salt or saltpetre if desired.

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.

Dandelion + parsleytop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together23 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Dandelion roots: Provide the main bitter, earthy flavour that the water draws out during infusion.
Parsley roots: Add a further earthy, herbal flavour to the infusion.

“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.