Name: Mint Julep, an American Receipt
Ingredients: Fresh mint leaves; Wine, brandy, or any other 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, an American Receipt

Ingredients

Fresh mint leaves
Wine, brandy, or any other spirit
Pounded ice

Directions

Prepare

Strip the tender leaves of mint into a tumbler.
Add your desired amount of wine, brandy, or other spirit.

Mix and serve

In a second tumbler, add pounded ice.
Pour the mixture from the first tumbler onto the ice in the second tumbler.
Continue to pour the mixture back and forth between the tumblers.

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

Fresh mint leaves: Releases aromatic oils that give the drink its fresh, minty fragrance.
Wine, brandy, or other spirit: Provides the alcoholic base and carries the flavour of the mint through the drink.
Pounded ice: Chills the drink and dilutes it slightly as it melts during mixing.

“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.