Name: Vermouth Cocktail
Ingredients: 2 dashes Boker's bitters; ⅓ cup Vermouth; ¼ slice of lemon; ice

Why it works: Vermouth and lemon work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 154 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Vermouth Cocktail

Ingredients

2 dashes Boker's bitters
⅓ cup Vermouth
¼ slice of lemon
ice

Directions

Combine bitters and vermouth with a small lump of ice in a small bar glass and shake well.
Strain into a cocktail glass with the lemon slice placed inside.
For a sweeter drink, add two dashes of gum syrup.

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.

Vermouth + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together154 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Vermouth: Forms the wine base and supplies the drink's sweetness, body and herbal aroma.
Boker's bitters: Adds aromatic bitterness that balances the vermouth's sweetness.

“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.