Name: Aroxatic Barley Wine
Ingredients: 1 cup barley-water; ½ cup Sherry wine; 1 teaspoon refined sugar

Why it works: Barley and sherry work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 37 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Aroxatic Barley Wine

Ingredients

1 cup barley-water
½ cup Sherry wine
1 teaspoon refined sugar

Directions

Make the wine

Boil the barley-water until it reduces by one-third.
Add the Sherry wine and refined sugar, then stir well.

Serve

Serve as a cordial two to three times a day.

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.

Barley + sherrytop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together37 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Barley + sugartop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together755 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Barley + winetop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together128 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Sherry + sugartop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,141 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Wine + sugartop 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

Barley-water: Forms the liquid base that is reduced by boiling to concentrate its flavour.
Sherry wine: Adds aroma and acidity that give the drink its character.
Refined sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the sherry and the reduced liquid.

“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.