Name: Blackberry Wine
Ingredients: blackberries; ½ pound sugar; cinnamon (optional)

Why it works: Sugar and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Blackberry Wine

Ingredients

blackberries
½ pound sugar
cinnamon (optional)

Directions

Make the juice

Extract the juice from the blackberries by pressing through a sieve or heating them.
Add ½ pound of sugar to each quart of juice.
Boil for 10 to 15 minutes.

Bottle and serve

Bottle the mixture in the usual manner.
For serving, dilute with water to taste.

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 + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Blackberries: Supply the juice, which carries the main flavor and color of the wine.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the blackberry juice.

“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.