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Liqueur Made with Spirits

A simple liqueur made by dissolving sugar in cold water, adding spirits, letting it stand, and filtering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Spirit and sugar work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 602 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Liqueur Made with Spirits

Ingredients

Directions

Make the liqueur

  1. Dissolve the sugar in the cold water.

  2. Add the spirits to the sugar-water mixture and stir well.

Rest and filter

  1. Let the mixture stand for 24 hours.

  2. Filter the liqueur through blotting paper in a funnel into a bottle.

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. Spirit + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 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

Spirits
Forms the alcoholic base and carries most of the flavour.
Fine sugar
Adds sweetness and body, softening the harshness of the alcohol.
Cold water
Dissolves the sugar and dilutes the spirits to a drinkable strength.

The step that matters

Dissolve the sugar completely in the water. Sugar that is not fully dissolved settles to the bottom, so the finished liqueur tastes uneven and too sweet at the base. Stirring until no grains remain before adding the spirits gives an evenly sweetened, clear liqueur.

“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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