Name: Lime-flower Tea
Ingredients: 1 oz. lime-flowers; 1 pint boiling water; sugar or honey (to taste)

Why it works: Lime and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,332 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Lime-flower Tea

Ingredients

1 oz. lime-flowers
1 pint boiling water
sugar or honey (to taste)

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Pour boiling water over lime-flowers in a teapot.
Let the infusion stand for 10 minutes.
Drink a cupful while hot.
Sweeten with sugar or honey 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.

Lime + sugartop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,332 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lime-flowers: Provide the main aromatic flavour and fragrance infused into the water.
Boiling water: Extracts flavour and aroma from the flowers during steeping.

“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.