Name: Almond Essence
Ingredients: ½ lb. bitter almonds; boiling water; 1 pint o. p. spirit

Why it works: Almond and spirit work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 143 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Almond Essence

Ingredients

½ lb. bitter almonds
boiling water
1 pint o. p. spirit

Directions

Prepare the almonds

Blanch the almonds by boiling them in water until the skins loosen.
Remove the outer skin from the almonds.

Infuse and bottle

Place the blanched almonds in a jar and cover with 1 pint of overproof spirit.
Let it infuse until the almonds settle at the bottom.
Drain off the liquid, bottle it, and seal.

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.

Almond + spirittop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together143 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

Bitter almonds: Provide the main almond aroma and flavour that the spirit draws out.
Overproof spirit: Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour compounds from the almonds during infusion.

“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.