Name: Rose Brandy
Ingredients: fragrant rose leaves; French brandy

Why it works: Rose and brandy work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 560 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Rose Brandy

Ingredients

fragrant rose leaves
French brandy

Directions

Gather rose leaves without bruising them.
Fill a pitcher with the leaves and cover them with French brandy.
The next day, pour off the brandy and remove the leaves.
Fill the pitcher with fresh rose leaves and return the brandy.
Repeat this process until the brandy is strongly infused with rose flavor.
Bottle the rose brandy and keep the pitcher covered during the process.

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.

Rose + brandytop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together560 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

Fragrant rose leaves: Provide the floral aroma that flavors the brandy during infusion.
French brandy: Acts as the alcohol-based solvent that extracts the rose flavor from the leaves.

“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.