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Ratafia d’Anis

A sweet anise-flavored liqueur made with sugar syrup, brandy, and aniseed infusion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Ratafia d’Anis

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a preserving pan, boil 2 pounds of sugar with ½ cup of water until clear and skimmed.

Infuse the aniseed

  1. Boil ½ cup of water and add 3 ounces of aniseed; let it infuse for 15 minutes.

  2. Combine the infused aniseed water with the sugar syrup and 3 pints of brandy.

  3. Stir well and transfer to a jar, sealing it tightly.

  4. Let it infuse in the sun for 3 weeks.

  5. Strain through a napkin or filtering cloth and bottle for use.

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. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Syrup + brandytop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together561 recipes

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Sugar
Sweetens the liqueur and, dissolved into syrup, gives it body.
Aniseed
Provides the characteristic anise aroma and flavour as it infuses.
Brandy
Acts as the spirit base that extracts and carries the aniseed flavour.

“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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