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Dessert

Scoke or Poke Berry

A sweet syrup made from poke berry juice and sugar, used to color cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Scoke or Poke Berry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Gather ripe poke berries and place them in a porcelain kettle.

  2. Cover the berries with cold water and boil slowly until the skins break.

  3. Strain the mixture to obtain the juice.

Make and bottle the syrup

  1. In a pot, combine 2 cups of the juice with 1 pound of sugar and boil for a few minutes.

  2. Bottle and seal the mixture.

Color the cream

  1. To color a pint of cream, start with ½ teaspoon of the juice and add more for a darker shade.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Berry + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together54 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Berry + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together146 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Poke berry juice
Gives the syrup its color and its fruity flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and gives it body as it boils with the juice.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice with sugar. Boiling dissolves the sugar fully into the juice and thickens the syrup slightly, so the sweetness is even throughout before bottling.

Swap the berry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Berrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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