Name: Shrub
Ingredients: 1 gallon of rum; 6 pounds of sugar; 1 quart of lime juice

Why it works: Rum and lime work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 412 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Shrub

Ingredients

1 gallon of rum
6 pounds of sugar
1 quart of lime juice

Directions

Dissolve the sugar in the lime juice.
Mix the sugar-lime mixture well with the rum.
Set the mixture in a bottle or cask to settle until it becomes mellow.

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.

Rum + limetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together412 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Rum + sugartop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,908 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Sugar + limetop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,332 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

Rum: Forms the alcoholic base of the drink and carries the flavour of the other ingredients.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the sourness of the lime juice.
Lime juice: Adds acidity and bright citrus flavour that cuts the sweetness of the sugar.