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Apricot Wine

A fermented wine made from apricots, water, white wine, sugar, mace, nutmeg, and fresh borage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and borage share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 76 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Apricot Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare, stone and bruise the apricots.

  2. Combine the bruised apricots with 6 quarts of water and 1 quart of white wine.

  3. Simmer gently until the fruit is soft.

  4. Let the mixture stand for 12 hours, stirring often.

  5. Pour off the liquid.

  6. Press the solids through a fine bag into a cask to ferment.

Add sugar and spice

  1. Add 1 pound of sugar for each gallon of liquid.

  2. Boil 1 ounce of mace and ½ ounce of nutmeg in 1 quart of white wine.

  3. Pour the hot spice wine into the fermenting wine.

  4. Hang a bunch of fresh borage in the cask for 3 days.

Finish

  1. After 3 days, draw off the wine.

  2. Bottle it.

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.

  1. Nutmeg + boragetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together76 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. White wine + apricottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. White wine + boragetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together27 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Apricot + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together207 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Apricots
Provide the fruit flavour and body that the wine is built on.
Sugar
Feeds the fermentation and provides sweetness in the finished wine.
White wine
Adds acidity and liquid to the mixture, helping extract flavour from the fruit.
Mace
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the wine.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the wine.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, apricot, sugar, nutmeg, borage):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, apricot, sugar, nutmeg, borage. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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