Name: A Very Useful Tincture of Nutmeg
Ingredients: 3 ounces bruised or grated nutmeg; 1 quart brandy

Why it works: Nutmeg and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,311 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

A Very Useful Tincture of Nutmeg

Ingredients

3 ounces bruised or grated nutmeg
1 quart brandy

Directions

Add the bruised or grated nutmeg to the brandy.
Seal the mixture and let it sit for a few days.
Use a few drops to add flavor to your dishes.

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.

Nutmeg + brandytop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,311 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Nutmeg: Provides the warm, aromatic flavor that the brandy slowly extracts over the steeping period.
Brandy: Acts as the solvent that draws aromatic compounds out of the nutmeg and preserves the tincture.

“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.