Name: To Improve British Brandy
Ingredients: 1 pint of spirit; 8 French plums; 5-6 drops of water of ammonia

Why it works: Spirit and plum work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

To Improve British Brandy

Ingredients

1 pint of spirit
8 French plums
5-6 drops of water of ammonia

Directions

Steep the plums

Put 8 French plums into 1 pint of spirit.
Steep for 10 days.

Strain and finish

Strain the spirit to remove the plums.
For new brandy, add 5-6 drops of water of ammonia to a bottle of brandy.
Cork the bottle and shake well.

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.

Spirit + plumtop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

French plums: Release their fruit flavour and colour into the spirit as they steep.
Spirit: Acts as a solvent that extracts flavour and colour from the plums.

“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.