Name: Sherry Cobbler
Ingredients: 4 glasses of sherry; 1 bottle of soda or seltzer; 1 tablespoon of pounded sugar; 1 glass of liqueur; ice

Why it works: Sherry and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,141 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Sherry Cobbler

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Fill 3 tumblers with a lump of ice.
Pour a third of the sherry into each tumbler.
Add a dash of liqueur to each glass.
Divide the soda among the 3 glasses.
Serve with straws.

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.

Sherry + sugartop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,141 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sherry: Forms the wine base and provides most of the drink's main flavour.
Soda or seltzer: Adds light carbonation and dilutes the drink, making it refreshing.
Pounded sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the sherry's dryness.
Liqueur: Adds aroma and extra flavour in small amounts.

“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.