Name: Mint Julep, an American Receipt
Ingredients: Tender mint leaves; Wine, brandy, or any other spirit; Pounded ice

Why it works: Mint and wine work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 442 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Mint Julep, an American Receipt

Ingredients

Tender mint leaves
Wine, brandy, or any other spirit
Pounded ice

Directions

Prepare

Place the tender mint leaves into a tumbler.
Add the chosen spirit to the tumbler.
Place pounded ice into a second tumbler.

Mix and serve

Pour the mixture from the first tumbler onto the ice in the second tumbler.
Continue pouring the mixture back and forth between the tumblers.

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.

Mint + winetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together442 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

Tender mint leaves: Release aromatic oils that give the drink its fresh mint scent and flavour.
Wine, brandy, or any other spirit: Provides the alcoholic base that carries the mint flavour and gives the drink its strength.
Pounded ice: Chills the drink and gradually dilutes it as it melts during pouring.

“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.