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Drink

Brait Tea

A tea made by boiling wheat bran with water, sweetened with molasses and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and lemon work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 585 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Brait Tea

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the cold water and wheat bran for twenty minutes.

  2. Settle the mixture with an egg shell or a little cold water.

  3. Sweeten with molasses and add lemon juice 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.

  1. Wheat + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together585 recipes

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

  2. Wheat + molassestop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together702 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Molasses + lemontop 36% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat bran
Gives the tea its body and earthy, grainy flavour.
Molasses
Adds sweetness and a deep, rich flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour.

The step that matters

Settle the mixture. Fine bran particles stay suspended in the hot liquid and cloud it. Letting them settle, helped by an egg shell or a little cold water, lets the bran sink so the tea can be poured off clear.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wheat, molasses):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wheat, molasses. 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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