Name: Senna and Aniseed Aperient Drink
Ingredients: ½ ounce senna, powdered; ½ ounce aniseed, powdered; ½ ounce fennel, powdered; 4 ounces Glauber's salts; 1 quart barley water; 1 quart oatmeal gruel

Why it works: Fennel and barley share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Senna and Aniseed Aperient Drink

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the senna, aniseed, and fennel in 1 quart of barley water.
Strain the mixture and add 4 ounces of Glauber's salts.
Finally, mix in 1 quart of oatmeal gruel.

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.

Fennel + barleytop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together19 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

Barley Water22 recipes

Vegetable Soup350 recipes

Raspberry Vinegar214 recipes

Brown Coffee with Egg175 recipes

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Senna and Aniseed Aperient Drink