Name: Apple Wine
Ingredients: 1 barrel of cyder; herb scurlea; quintessence of wine; ¼ teaspoon nitre; 1 pound syrup of honey

Why it works: Wine and honey work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 606 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutanoic acid ethyl ester, which smells sweet, green. The science ↓

Apple Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Add the herb scurlea, quintessence of wine, nitre, and syrup of honey to the barrel of cider.
Let it ferment in the cask until clear and well settled.
Draw off the wine once it is clear.

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.

Wine + honeytop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together606 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutanoic acid ethyl ester (sweet, green).
Syrup + honeytop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together325 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Wine + syruptop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together381 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cyder: Provides the fermentable sugars and liquid base that become the wine.
Syrup of honey: Adds sweetness and feeds the fermentation, adding body to the finished wine.
Nitre: Acts as a preservative and helps the fermentation proceed cleanly.

“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.