Name: English Cherry Wine
Ingredients: 3 quarts cherry juice; 1 quart water; 3 pounds sugar

Why it works: Cherry and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,598 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

English Cherry Wine

Ingredients

3 quarts cherry juice
1 quart water
3 pounds sugar

Directions

Prepare

Mash well-ripened cherries using a pounder or your hands in a cloth.

Make the wine

Combine 3 quarts of the cherry juice with 1 quart of water and 3 pounds of sugar.
Allow the mixture to ferment.

Store

Store the wine to improve its flavor over time.

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.

Cherry + sugartop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,598 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cherry juice: Provides the main fruit flavor and the liquid base for fermentation.
Sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation, which produces the alcohol in the wine.

“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.