Name: Barberry Water Ice
Ingredients: 1½ pints barberry jelly; ½ quart cold boiled water; 2 tablespoons sugar; ⅓ cup brandy

Why it works: Sugar and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Barberry Water Ice

Ingredients

1½ pints barberry jelly
½ quart cold boiled water
2 tablespoons sugar
⅓ cup brandy

Directions

Warm the barberry jelly in a saucepan.
Add cold boiled water to make a total of 1 quart.
Stir in sugar and brandy.
Chill the mixture and freeze it as you would other ices.

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 + brandytop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together11,939 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Barberry jelly: Provides the main tart fruit flavour and colour, and sets the base of the ice.
Sugar: Sweetens the ice and softens its texture so it freezes less hard.
Brandy: Lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice softer and more scoopable.

“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.