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Brandied Fruits

Contains alcohol and salicylic acid; ensure proper handling and storage.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 342 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Brandied Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Select the largest and soundest strawberries and place them in a clean two-gallon stone jar.

  2. Cover the strawberries with 2 pounds of granulated sugar.

  3. Stone and weigh any additional fruit you wish to use, adding 1 pound of sugar for every pound of fruit.

  4. Pour 1 pint of pure alcohol over the fruit, in which you have dissolved 5 cents' worth of salicylic acid.

  5. Seal the jar with thick paper and add more fruit in season, maintaining the same sugar-to-fruit ratio.

  6. In the fall, pack the mixture into glass jars and store in a dry, cool place.

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. Peach + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Apricot + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Peach + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Pineapple + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, banana, pineapple, orange, peach, apricot, plum):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, banana, pineapple, orange, peach, apricot, plum. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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