Name: Tamarind Drink
Ingredients: 2 ounces tamarinds; ¼ pound stoned raisins; 1½ pints water

Why it works: Tamarind and raisin work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 36 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, creamy. The science ↓

Tamarind Drink

Ingredients

2 ounces tamarinds
¼ pound stoned raisins
1½ pints water

Directions

Boil 2 ounces of tamarinds and ¼ pound of stoned raisins in 1½ pints of water for 45 minutes.
Strain the mixture and let the liquid cool.
Serve chilled.

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.

Tamarind + raisintop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together36 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Tamarinds: Provide the sour, tangy flavour that gives the drink its acidity.
Stoned raisins: Add natural sweetness and body to balance the tamarind's sourness.

“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.