Name: Rhubarb Wine
Ingredients: 1 peck rhubarb, cut into small pieces; 3 quarts boiling water; 3 pounds brown sugar; 1 gallon juice from rhubarb

Why it works: Rhubarb and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,852 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Rhubarb Wine

Ingredients

1 peck rhubarb, cut into small pieces
3 quarts boiling water
3 pounds brown sugar
1 gallon juice from rhubarb

Directions

Prepare the juice

Combine the rhubarb pieces with boiling water in a large container.
Let it sit for one week, stirring and mashing daily.
Strain the mixture through a coarse cloth.

Ferment and bottle

Add brown sugar to the strained juice and mix well.
Transfer to a jug and loosely cork it until October.
Afterward, rack off the wine and bottle it tightly.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Rhubarb + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,852 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Rhubarb: Provides the tart flavour and the fermentable juice that becomes the wine.
Brown sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and adding sweetness and caramel notes.

“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.