Name: Apricot Wine
Ingredients: 8 lbs apricots; 1 quart water; 2 lbs loaf sugar

Why it works: Apricot and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,630 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Apricot Wine

Ingredients

8 lbs apricots
1 quart water
2 lbs loaf sugar

Directions

Prepare the pulp

Remove the stones from the apricots and bruise the pulp in a mortar.
Add 1 quart of water to the pulp and let the mixture stand for 24 hours.

Make the juice and ferment

Squeeze out the juice from the mixture.
For every gallon of juice, add 2 lbs of loaf sugar.
Put the mixture into a cask and allow it to ferment.
Once the wine is clear, bottle it.

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.

Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,630 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Apricots: Provide the fruit juice and flavor that the wine is made from.
Loaf sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation and adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the fruit.

“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.