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
Directions
Combine lavender flowers, rectified spirit, and water in a distillation apparatus.
Distill the mixture to obtain 8 pints of lavender spirit.
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.
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Lavender + spirittop 14% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Provide the floral aroma that the distillation carries into the spirit.
- Rectified spirit
- Acts as the alcohol base that dissolves and carries the lavender aroma compounds.
- Water
- Dilutes the spirit and helps extract the flavour from the flowers during distillation.
The step that matters
Distill the mixture to obtain 8 pints of lavender spirit.. Alcohol and water boil at different temperatures, so heating must be controlled to collect the volatile aroma compounds without scorching the flowers or carrying over bitter, heavy notes. Stopping at the stated volume keeps the spirit's balance consistent.
“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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