Name: A Drink to Check Purging
Ingredients: ½ pint red wine; 1 ounce aromatic confection; ½ ounce tincture of opium; ½ ounce sweet spirits of nitre; 1 pint warm gruel

Why it works: Red wine and spirit work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

A Drink to Check Purging

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the red wine, aromatic confection, tincture of opium, and sweet spirits of nitre in a pint of warm gruel.
Serve the mixture.

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.

Red wine + spirittop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

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A Drink to Check Purging