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A Series of New and Cheap Drinks

A simple apple cider made by boiling apples in water, straining, and sweetening with brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

A Series of New and Cheap Drinks

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cider

  1. Boil 1 gallon of water.

  2. Add the quartered apples and boil until they can be pulped.

  3. Pass the liquid through a colander.

Sweeten and bottle

  1. Boil the liquid again with ½ pound of brown sugar.

  2. Bottle the mixture without corking and store in a cool 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.

  1. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Cook down into the liquid, supplying the main fruit flavor and aroma.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, molasses-like flavor to the cider.

The step that matters

Bottle the mixture without corking and store in a cool place.. The cider still contains sugars and live yeasts that can ferment. A tightly sealed bottle can trap carbon dioxide and build pressure, while cool storage slows fermentation.

“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.

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