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Anise Syrup

A sweet syrup made by boiling water, green anise, sugar, and cinnamon bark.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Anise and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 117 recipes. Both carry 4-methoxybenzaldehyde, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

Anise Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the anise, sugar, water, and cinnamon together until it thickens into a syrup.

  2. Strain the mixture and bottle it while hot.

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. Anise + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together117 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Anise + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together328 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon 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

Sugar
Sweetness and body; it thickens as the water boils off into a syrup.
Green anise
Provides the main anise flavour, infused into the syrup as it boils.
Cinnamon bark
Adds warm aromatic spice that rounds out the anise flavour.

The step that matters

Boil until it thickens into a syrup. Boiling drives off water and concentrates the sugar, so the syrup thickens and keeps well. Stopping too early leaves a thin, watery syrup that spoils more readily.

Swap the anise

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cinnamon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Anisethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon. 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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