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Ratafia De Peches

A peach liqueur made by infusing peaches with spirits, sugar, and vanilla, then filtering and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 558 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Ratafia De Peches

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse

  1. Put broken peaches into an earthenware jar.

  2. Add a pinch of powdered cochineal and cover with 3 quarts of spirits.

  3. Seal the jar and let it infuse for 20 days.

Make the syrup and bottle

  1. Strain and mix 1.5 pints of juice with 3 pints of clear syrup.

  2. Filter, bottle, and cork the mixture.

  3. Alternatively, remove the stones from small peaches, cut them, and squeeze to extract juice.

  4. Mix this juice with 3 pints of spirits and a stick of vanilla, infusing for 6 weeks in sunlight.

  5. Strain and add less than 1 pound of syrup, then filter.

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. Peach + vanillatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together558 recipes

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

  2. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Vanilla + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  4. Syrup + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,855 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Spirit + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together53 recipes

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

Vanilla and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches
Supply the flavour and the juice that is later pressed out and mixed in.
Spirits
Extract flavour and colour from the fruit and act as the base of the liqueur.
Sugar
Sweetens the finished ratafia and balances the alcohol.
Clear syrup
Adds sweetness and body to the mixed juice and spirit.
Vanilla
Adds aroma to the infusion.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Peachthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against spirit, syrup, vanilla, sugar. 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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