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Drink

Camomile Tea

A herbal infusion made from 30 camomile flowers steeped in boiling water, sweetened with sugar or honey, optionally flavored with grated ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Camomile Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse

  1. Place about 30 camomile flowers in a jug.

  2. Pour 1 pint of boiling water over the flowers.

  3. Cover the jug and let it steep for about 10 minutes.

Strain and sweeten

  1. Strain the tea into another jug, discarding the flowers.

  2. Sweeten with sugar or honey to taste.

  3. For a variation, stir in a large 2 teaspoons of moist sugar and a little grated ginger before serving.

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.

  1. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Camomile flowers
Provide the main floral aroma and flavour as their compounds dissolve into the water.
Boiling water
Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour and aroma from the flowers.
Sugar or honey
Adds sweetness to balance the tea's mildly bitter, herbal flavour.

The step that matters

Cover the jug while steeping. Covering the jug traps the volatile aromatic compounds that would otherwise escape with the steam, so the tea keeps more of its fragrance and flavour.

“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.

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