Name: Mint Julep
Ingredients: Tender mint leaves; Wine, brandy, or any 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

Ingredients

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

Directions

Make the julep

Strip the tender leaves of mint into a tumbler.
Add your desired amount of wine, brandy, or spirit to the mint.
In a second tumbler, place some pounded ice.
Pour the mint and spirit mixture over the ice.
Continue pouring the mixture back and forth between the tumblers until well mixed and flavored with mint.

Chill and serve

Place the glass in a larger glass filled with pounded ice.
Remove from the larger glass to serve, and it will be frosted.

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: Provide the aromatic oils that flavor the drink.
Wine, brandy, or any spirit: Provides the alcoholic base that carries the mint flavor.
Pounded ice: Chills the drink and dilutes it slightly as it melts.

“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.