Name: Bran Tea
Ingredients: 1 pint wheat bran; 1 quart boiling water; cream; sugar

Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Bran Tea

Ingredients

1 pint wheat bran
1 quart boiling water
cream
sugar

Directions

Make the tea

Combine the wheat bran and boiling water in an earthen teapot.
Place the teapot on the stove and let it simmer for one hour.
Strain the mixture.

Serve

Serve with cream and sugar, as you would with any other tea.

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.

Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Wheat + creamtop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together681 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Wheat + sugartop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,071 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Wheat bran: Steeps into the water, giving the tea its body, grainy flavour and toasty character.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the mild, grainy taste of the bran tea.
Cream: Adds fat and richness that softens the tea's earthy flavour.

“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.