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John Dabney's Mint Julep

A chilled cocktail of crushed ice, sugar, mint, whiskey, and optional fruit garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Strawberry and pineapple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 433 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

John Dabney's Mint Julep

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pack as much crushed ice as you can into a glass.

  2. Add sugar and crushed mint to the ice.

  3. Pour in the whiskey.

  4. Top with more mint leaves and your choice of garnish like a strawberry, cherry, or slice of pineapple.

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. Strawberry + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together433 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cherry + pineappletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together537 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Strawberry + cherrytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together217 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  4. Mint + pineappletop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together182 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  5. Mint + strawberrytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together263 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Whiskey
Provides the spirit base and the main alcoholic flavour of the drink.
Sugar
Sweetens the drink and helps draw out flavour from the crushed mint.
Fresh mint
Supplies the aroma; crushing releases its aromatic oils into the drink.

The step that matters

Crushing the mint with the sugar. Crushing mint gently releases its aromatic oils. Bruising too hard can release bitter chlorophyll compounds, so press just enough to release fragrance.

Swap the strawberry

The recipe marks strawberry as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, mint, cherry, pineapple):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Strawberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, mint, cherry, pineapple. 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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