Name: Gin and Calamus
Ingredients: 2-3 small pieces of calamus root; gin

Why it works: Calamus and gin work together. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Gin and Calamus

Ingredients

2-3 small pieces of calamus root
gin

Directions

Make the infusion

Place the calamus root in a bottle of gin.
Let it sit until the essence is extracted.

Serve

Serve by handing out a glass with the bottle, allowing the customer to help themselves.

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.

Calamus + gintop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Calamus root: Provides the main aromatic flavour, which its essence carries into the gin as it steeps.
Gin: Acts as the solvent that draws the essence out of the calamus root.

“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.