Name: Sloe Whisky
Ingredients: 10 lbs sloes; 7 lbs white sugar; 24 gallons best whisky

Why it works: Sugar and whisky are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,008 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Sloe Whisky

Ingredients

10 lbs sloes
7 lbs white sugar
24 gallons best whisky

Directions

Infuse

Combine sloes, sugar, and whisky in a 5-gallon jar and seal the jar tightly with a cork.
Shake the jar daily for one month.

Strain and bottle

After a month, strain the mixture and bottle the liquid.

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 + whiskytop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,008 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

Sloes: Supply the main fruit flavour, colour, and tartness that the whisky takes on during steeping.
White sugar: Adds sweetness that balances the sloes' sharp tartness and helps draw juice from the fruit.
Whisky: Acts as the solvent that extracts flavour and colour from the sloes and preserves the liquid.

“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.