Name: Coffee Syrup
Ingredients: ½ lb coffee; ½ gal water; 12 lbs sugar; ½ gal water; 1 oz good rum

Why it works: Coffee and rum work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 138 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Coffee Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the coffee infusion

Boil ½ gallon of water and add ½ pound of coffee.
Let it steep for 20 minutes.
Strain the mixture through cheesecloth.

Make the syrup

In a separate pot, combine 12 pounds of sugar with ½ gallon of water and stir until dissolved.
Add 1 ounce of good rum to the sugar mixture.
Combine the coffee infusion with the sugar mixture.

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.

Coffee + rumtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together138 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,908 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Coffee + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,344 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

Coffee: Provides the main coffee flavor and bitterness that the syrup is built on.
Sugar: Provides sweetness and the thick, syrupy body of the final mixture.
Rum: Adds a warm aroma and flavor layer to the finished syrup.

“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.