Name: Strawberry Water
Ingredients: 2 quarts strawberries; ⅓ cup strawberry spirit; 3 tablespoons cochineal extract; 1 tablespoon cudbear; 3 pounds tartaric acid

Why it works: Strawberry and spirit work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Strawberry Water

Ingredients

Directions

Mix all ingredients in a glass demijohn.
Filter the mixture a few days later.

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.

Strawberry + spirittop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6 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

Strawberries: Provide the main fruit flavor and aroma for the drink.
Strawberry spirit: Adds concentrated strawberry aroma and alcohol to the mixture.
Cochineal extract: Provides a red color to the liquid.
Cudbear: Adds a further red-purple coloring to the liquid.
Tartaric acid: Adds sharp acidity that brightens the strawberry flavor.

“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.