Name: Anisette
Ingredients: 10 drops oil of anise-seed; 3 pints alcohol; 2 pounds sugar; 1.5 pounds pure water

Why it works: Anise and sugar work together. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 328 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Anisette

Ingredients

10 drops oil of anise-seed
3 pints alcohol
2 pounds sugar
1.5 pounds pure water

Directions

Make a syrup with the sugar and cold water.
Mix the syrup with the oil of anise seed and alcohol.

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.

Anise + sugartop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together328 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Oil of anise-seed: Supplies the characteristic anise flavour and aroma.
Alcohol: Carries and dissolves the aromatic oil so the flavour spreads evenly through the liquid.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and body to the syrup.

“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.