Name: Simple Wine Whey
Ingredients: ½ cup water; ½ cup milk; ⅓ cup white wine; sugar to taste

Why it works: Milk and white wine work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 929 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

Simple Wine Whey

Ingredients

½ cup water
½ cup milk
⅓ cup white wine
sugar to taste

Directions

Warm the water and milk together in a saucepan.
Add the white wine to the mixture.
Sweeten to taste with sugar.

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.

Milk + white winetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together929 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).
Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together77,875 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
White wine + sugartop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,586 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Milk: Provides milk proteins that clump into curds when acid is added, leaving the whey liquid.
White wine: Adds acidity that causes the milk proteins to curdle and separate from the liquid.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the wine.

“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.