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A Good Drink for the Lungs

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Irish moss and nutmeg share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

A Good Drink for the Lungs

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the Irish moss thoroughly.

  2. Place the moss in a pitcher and pour 2 cups of boiling water over it.

  3. Keep the mixture at boiling point (but do not boil) for 2 hours.

  4. Strain the mixture and squeeze in the juice of 1 lemon.

  5. Sweeten to taste, or add wine, vanilla, or nutmeg if lemon is not suitable.

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. Irish moss + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Irish moss + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Irish moss + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together61 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Vanilla + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Swap the vanilla

The recipe marks vanilla as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (irish moss, lemon, wine, nutmeg):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Vanillathe original
  4. Peachfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against irish moss, lemon, wine, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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