Name: Knickerbocker
Ingredients: 1 pint lemon-water ice; ½ pint Madeira wine; 1 pint iced seltzer-water

Why it works: Lemon and madeira wine work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 466 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Knickerbocker

Ingredients

1 pint lemon-water ice
½ pint Madeira wine
1 pint iced seltzer-water

Directions

Mix the lemon-water ice, Madeira wine, and iced seltzer-water together in a china bowl.
Serve in glasses.

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.

Lemon + madeira winetop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together466 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

Lemon-water ice: Provides the sweetness and cold, icy body that forms the drink's base.
Madeira wine: Adds a rich, fortified wine flavour and aroma to the punch.
Iced seltzer-water: Adds carbonation, giving the drink lightness and fizz.

“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.