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Drink

Camomile Tea

A herbal infusion of camomile flowers, lemon rind, and cloves, steeped overnight and served before breakfast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Lemon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,150 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Camomile Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Steep

  1. Combine camomile flowers, lemon rind, and cloves in a bowl.

  2. Pour 1 cup of boiling water over the mixture.

  3. Cover the bowl and let it steep overnight.

Strain and serve

  1. In the morning, strain the liquid.

  2. Take ⅓ cup of the tea before breakfast.

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. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Camomile flowers
Provide the main floral aroma and flavour as hot water draws out their compounds.
Lemon rind
Adds a bright citrus aroma from the oils in the peel.
Cloves
Add a warm, spicy aroma that rounds out the floral flavour.
Boiling water
Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour and aroma from the plant material.

The step that matters

Cover the bowl while steeping. Covering the bowl keeps the volatile aromatic compounds from escaping with the steam, so they stay in the liquid and the tea tastes fuller.

“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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