Name: Raspberry Syrup
Ingredients: 1 quart vinegar; 3 quarts raspberries; 1 pound sugar for each pint of juice

Why it works: Vinegar and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,806 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Raspberry Syrup

Ingredients

1 quart vinegar
3 quarts raspberries
1 pound sugar for each pint of juice

Directions

Prepare the juice

Combine 1 quart of vinegar with 3 quarts of raspberries in a container.
Let the mixture stand for 1 day.
Squeeze the mixture through a cloth to extract the juice.

Make the syrup

For each pint of juice, add 1 pound of sugar.
Boil the mixture for 20 minutes.

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.

Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20,806 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

Raspberries: Provide the main fruit flavour and the juice that becomes the syrup.
Vinegar: Adds acidity that sharpens the fruit flavour and helps extract juice from the berries.
Sugar: Sweetens the syrup and, once boiled, thickens it into a syrup texture.

“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.