Name: Damson Wine
Ingredients: 4 gallons ripe damsons; 4 gallons boiling water; 3.5 pounds good lump sugar per gallon of liquor; 1 quart spirits for every 3 gallons

Why it works: Sugar and spirit 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 ↓

Damson Wine

Ingredients

4 gallons ripe damsons
4 gallons boiling water
3.5 pounds good lump sugar per gallon of liquor
1 quart spirits for every 3 gallons

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Select sound, ripe damsons, discarding any stale or moldy fruit.
Remove the stalks and soak the damsons in boiling water for 4 to 5 days, stirring daily.

Make the wine

Dissolve 3.5 pounds of sugar for each gallon of liquid.
Transfer the mixture to a cask and add 1 quart of spirits for every 3 gallons.
Let it sit for 12 months before bottling.

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.

Sugar + spirittop 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

Damsons: Provide the fruit flavour, aroma and colour that define the wine.
Lump sugar: Feeds the fermentation and adds sweetness that balances the fruit's tartness.
Spirits: Raise the alcohol content and help preserve the wine during long storage.

“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.