Name: English Sack
Ingredients: 1 gallon water; 4 sprigs rue; 1 handful fennel roots; ¾ pound honey

Why it works: Fennel and honey work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 99 recipes. Both carry 4-methoxybenzaldehyde, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

English Sack

Ingredients

1 gallon water
4 sprigs rue
1 handful fennel roots
¾ pound honey

Directions

Make the mead

Boil water with rue and fennel roots for 30 minutes.
Strain the mixture.
Add ¾ pound of honey for every quart of liquid.
Boil for 2 hours, skimming off any foam.

Age and bottle

Pour the boiled mixture into a clean cask.
Let it age in the cask for 1 year before bottling.

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.

Fennel + honeytop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together99 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Honey: Provides the sugar that ferments into alcohol and gives the drink its sweetness.
Water: Forms the bulk of the liquid and carries the honey and herb flavours.
Fennel roots: Adds a light anise-like aroma to the finished drink.

“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.