Name: Rhubarb Water
Ingredients: 6 ounces rhubarb roots; 1 quart water; ⅓ cup wine

Why it works: Rhubarb and wine work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 89 recipes. Both carry 2-methoxy-4-propylphenol, which smells allspice, anise. The science ↓

Rhubarb Water

Ingredients

6 ounces rhubarb roots
1 quart water
⅓ cup wine

Directions

Prepare

Cut rhubarb roots into small pieces.
Place them in a quart bottle and fill with water.
Set aside for three days.

Use

Take ⅓ cup of the mixture at dinner time and mix it with wine.
Refill the bottle when any is taken out and renew the rhubarb roots every two weeks.

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.

Rhubarb + winetop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together89 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-propylphenol (allspice, anise).

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

What each ingredient does

Rhubarb roots: Provide the flavour compounds that steep into the water over the three days.
Water: Acts as the solvent that draws flavour out of the rhubarb roots.
Wine: Mixed with the rhubarb water at serving, adding alcohol and its own flavour to the drink.

“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.