Name: Eschalot Wine
Ingredients: 6 ounces eschalots, peeled and minced; 1 ounce scraped horseradish; 1 quart sherry; 6 ounces eschalots, prepared in the same manner

Why it works: Horseradish and sherry work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 95 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓

Eschalot Wine

Ingredients

6 ounces eschalots, peeled and minced
1 ounce scraped horseradish
1 quart sherry
6 ounces eschalots, prepared in the same manner

Directions

Pound the minced eschalots and horseradish in a mortar.
Steep the mixture in sherry for 10 days.
Pour off the clear liquid and add 6 more ounces of prepared eschalots.
Let it stand for another 10 days, then strain and bottle.

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.

Horseradish + sherrytop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together95 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Eschalots: Supply the main flavour of the wine as they steep in the sherry.
Horseradish: Adds sharp, pungent aroma that infuses into the sherry.
Sherry: Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour from the eschalots and horseradish.

“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.