Name: To Preserve Strawberries in Wine
Ingredients: large strawberries; 3 tablespoons fine sugar; white wine

Why it works: Sugar and white wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,586 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

To Preserve Strawberries in Wine

Ingredients

large strawberries
3 tablespoons fine sugar
white wine

Directions

Assemble

Place the strawberries in a clean bottle.
Sprinkle the sugar over the strawberries.
Fill the bottle with white wine.

Seal and store

Seal the bottle with paper and store it in a dry 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.

Sugar + white winetop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,586 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Large strawberries: Provide the fruit flavor and soft texture that the wine takes on over time.
Fine sugar: Draws moisture out of the strawberries and adds sweetness, helping preserve them.
White wine: Acts as the liquid that soaks into the fruit, carrying its flavor and keeping it submerged.

“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.