Name: Fruit Syrup
Ingredients: 2 oz tartaric acid; 1 quart water; 5 lbs fruit (gooseberries, blackberries, raspberries, black currants, etc.); 1½ lbs fine white sugar

Why it works: Black currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Fruit Syrup

Ingredients

2 oz tartaric acid
1 quart water
5 lbs fruit (gooseberries, blackberries, raspberries, black currants, etc.)
1½ lbs fine white sugar

Directions

Make the juice

Dissolve tartaric acid in water.
Pour the mixture over the fruit and let it stand for 24 hours.
Strain the mixture.

Sweeten and bottle

Add 1½ lbs of sugar for each pint of juice and stir occasionally.
Let it stand for another 24 hours.
Bottle and seal the corks.

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.

Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together393 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Fruit: Provides the flavour and juice that make up the syrup.
Tartaric acid: Adds sharp acidity that brightens the fruit flavour and helps keep the syrup stable.
Fine white sugar: Sweetens the juice and balances the tartness of the acid.

“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.