Name: Oatmeal Tea
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons coarse oatmeal; 1 quart boiling water; rind and juice of ½ lemon; 2 teaspoons sugar

Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Oatmeal Tea

Ingredients

2 tablespoons coarse oatmeal
1 quart boiling water
rind and juice of ½ lemon
2 teaspoons sugar

Directions

Place 2 tablespoons of coarse oatmeal in a jug.
Pour 1 quart of boiling water over the oatmeal.
Add the rind and juice of ½ lemon and 2 teaspoons of sugar.
Cover the jug and let it sit by the fire for at least 1 hour.
Strain the tea and serve.

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.

Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Coarse oatmeal: Steeps into the water to give the tea its body and mild flavour.
Lemon: Its juice adds acidity and its rind adds aromatic citrus flavour.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the lemon.

“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.