Name: Milk Powder for Cows
Ingredients: 1 part potassium nitrate; 1 part alum; 1 part sublimed sulphur; 1 part prepared chalk; 2 parts white bole; 5 parts red clover; 10 parts anise; 10 parts fennel; 10 parts salt

Why it works: Anise and fennel share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 47 recipes. Both carry cis-anethole, which smells anise. The science ↓

Milk Powder for Cows

Ingredients

Directions

Grind all ingredients into a fine powder.
Mix the powders thoroughly.
Add 1 or 2 handfuls of the mixture to the morning feed.

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.

Anise + fenneltop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together47 recipes

Shared aroma: cis-anethole (anise).

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

Vegetable Soup350 recipes

Raspberry Vinegar214 recipes

Brown Coffee with Egg175 recipes

Blackberry Cordial129 recipes

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Milk Powder for Cows