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To Make Peppermint Water

A simple peppermint-infused water made with peppermint oil, wine spirits, and rain or soft water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Spirit and wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 701 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

To Make Peppermint Water

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the peppermint oil and spirits of wine together until well combined.

  2. Add the mixture to a gallon of rain water or soft water.

  3. Stir well before using.

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.

  1. Spirit + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together701 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Peppermint + winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together369 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Peppermint + spirittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together57 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

Peppermint oil
Provides the main minty aroma and flavour that the water carries.
Spirits of wine
Helps the peppermint oil disperse evenly so it mixes into the water rather than floating apart.

The step that matters

Mix the peppermint oil and spirits of wine together until well combined.. Peppermint oil does not dissolve in water on its own. Blending it fully into the spirit first lets it disperse evenly when added to the water, so the flavour is consistent rather than oily or patchy.

Swap the peppermint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spirit, wine):

  1. Rosemaryfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Mintfits about as well
  4. Peppermintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spirit, wine. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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