Name: Simple Spirit of Lavender
Ingredients: 2 lbs lavender flowers (free from stalks); 8 pints rectified spirit; 16 pints water

Why it works: Lavender and spirit work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Simple Spirit of Lavender

Ingredients

2 lbs lavender flowers (free from stalks)
8 pints rectified spirit
16 pints water

Directions

Combine lavender flowers, rectified spirit, and water in a distillation apparatus.
Distill the mixture to obtain 8 pints of lavender spirit.

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.

Lavender + spirittop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together122 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

Lavender flowers: Supply the aromatic oils that give the spirit its floral scent and flavour.
Rectified spirit: Acts as the alcohol base that dissolves and carries the lavender aroma during distillation.
Water: Dilutes the spirit and helps extract aromatic compounds from the flowers 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.