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Drink

May Drink

A sweet wine infused with young woodruff leaves, steeped and served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,581 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

May Drink

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dissolve the sugar in enough water to make a solution in a large bowl.

  2. Add the picked woodruff leaves to the bowl.

Steep

  1. Pour the wine over the woodruff.

  2. Let it steep for 15 minutes.

  3. Remove the woodruff from the bowl.

Serve and store

  1. Ladle the drink into tumblers.

  2. If storing, strain the drink to remove all woodruff before bottling.

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 + winetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the drink and balances the wine's acidity.
Young woodruff leaves
Give the drink its characteristic aroma and flavor as they steep.
Moselle or rhine wine
Forms the base liquid and carries the flavor of the leaves.

The step that matters

Removing the woodruff after steeping. Steeping draws flavor out of the leaves continuously. Leaving them in the wine too long can extract harsh, bitter notes that overpower the drink, so the leaves should come out when the steeping time ends.

“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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