Name: Apricot Wine
Ingredients: 12 pounds ripe apricots; 2 gallons water; 6 ounces loaf sugar per quart of liquor; lump of sugar for each bottle

Why it works: Apricot and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,630 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Apricot Wine

Ingredients

12 pounds ripe apricots
2 gallons water
6 ounces loaf sugar per quart of liquor
lump of sugar for each bottle

Directions

Prepare the apricots

Wipe clean and cut the apricots.
Boil the apricots in water until the flavor is extracted.

Strain and sweeten

Strain the liquid through a fine sieve.
Add 6 ounces of sugar for every quart of liquid and boil again.
Skim off any scum that rises.

Ferment and bottle

Pour the liquid into an earthen vessel.
The next day, bottle it, adding a lump of sugar to each bottle.

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.

Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,630 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Apricots: Provide the main fruit flavor and aroma that the liquid draws out during boiling.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the fruit's tartness in the finished wine.

“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.