Name: Sage Tea
Ingredients: ½ ounce dry sage leaves; 1 quart boiling water; sugar to taste; lemon juice to taste

Why it works: Sage and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 887 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Sage Tea

Ingredients

½ ounce dry sage leaves
1 quart boiling water
sugar to taste
lemon juice to taste

Directions

Infuse the sage leaves in boiling water for 30 minutes.
Strain the tea.
Add sugar and lemon juice as desired.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Sage + lemontop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together887 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Sage + sugartop 37% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together538 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Dry sage leaves: Provide the main herbal flavour and aroma that the infusion carries.
Boiling water: Extracts flavour and aroma from the sage leaves during infusion.