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

Why it works: Sugar and madeira wine work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 343 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

To Preserve Strawberries in Wine

Ingredients

large strawberries
3 tablespoons fine sugar
Madeira wine or fine sherry

Directions

Place a quantity of the finest large strawberries into a clean bottle.
Add 3 tablespoons of fine sugar.
Fill the bottle with Madeira wine or fine sherry.

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 + madeira winetop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together343 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 flavour and soft texture that the wine and sugar preserve.
Fine sugar: Sweetens the wine and draws juice from the strawberries, helping preserve them.
Madeira wine or fine sherry: Acts as the preserving liquid and adds its own rich, nutty aroma.

“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.