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Fruit Syrup

A sweet syrup made by boiling fruit juice with plain syrup, then adding fruit acid and soda foam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Strawberry and raspberry work together. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 815 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, sweet. The science ↓

Fruit Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Mix fruit juice and plain syrup in a pot.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Remove from heat and let it cool.

Finish and color

  1. Once cool, add fruit acid and soda foam.

  2. For coloring, use carmine for strawberry, cherry, and currant, but avoid over-coloring.

  3. Use carmine and caramel for raspberry, and saffron or sugar yellow for peach.

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. Strawberry + raspberrytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together815 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, sweet).

  2. Cherry + raspberrytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together192 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Strawberry + cherrytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together217 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  4. Currant + raspberrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together366 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

  5. Cherry + saffrontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Fruit juice
Provides the fruit flavor and most of the liquid base of the syrup.
Plain syrup
Supplies sweetness and body, giving the syrup its texture.
Fruit acid
Adds sourness that brightens the fruit flavor and balances the sugar.
Soda foam
Adds carbonation, giving the finished drink its fizz.

The step that matters

Avoid over-coloring. Carmine is a strong colorant, so a small amount goes a long way. Adding too much makes the syrup deeper and less true to the intended fruit shade, and it cannot be easily undone once mixed in.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (syrup, strawberry, cherry, raspberry, saffron):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against syrup, strawberry, cherry, raspberry, saffron. 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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