Name: Peppermint Water
Ingredients: 2 pounds dried peppermint; 7 ounces proof spirit; 2 gallons water

Why it works: Peppermint and spirit work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 57 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Peppermint Water

Ingredients

2 pounds dried peppermint
7 ounces proof spirit
2 gallons water

Directions

Combine the dried peppermint, proof spirit, and water in a distillation apparatus.
Distill one gallon of the mixture.
Store the distilled peppermint water 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.

Peppermint + spirittop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together57 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

Dried peppermint: Provides the main peppermint aroma and flavour that the distilled water carries.
Proof spirit: Helps extract and carry the peppermint's aromatic oils during distillation.

“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.