Name: Apple Wine
Ingredients: 1 barrel of cider; herb scurlea; 1 teaspoon nitre; 1 pound honey syrup

Why it works: Cider and honey work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 256 recipes. Both carry ethyl decanoate, which smells grape, waxy. The science ↓

Apple Wine

Ingredients

1 barrel of cider
herb scurlea
1 teaspoon nitre
1 pound honey syrup

Directions

Add the herb scurlea, nitre, and honey syrup to the barrel of cider.
Let it ferment in the cask until clear and well settled.
Once settled, draw it off for use.

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.

Cider + honeytop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together256 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl decanoate (grape, waxy).
Honey + syruptop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together325 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Cider + syruptop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together125 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

Cider: Provides the fermentable base that becomes the wine.
Honey syrup: Supplies sugar for the yeast to ferment, adding sweetness and body to the finished wine.
Nitre: Acts as a preservative and adds a mild chemical influence on the fermentation.

“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.