Name: Cherry Wine
Ingredients: 15 pounds cherries; 2 pounds currants; 10 ounces sugar (¼ pound for every pint of juice); Vine leaves (for covering); Sand (for covering)

Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Cherry Wine

Ingredients

15 pounds cherries
2 pounds currants
10 ounces sugar (¼ pound for every pint of juice)
Vine leaves (for covering)
Sand (for covering)

Directions

Prepare

Bruise the cherries and currants together.
Mix in two-thirds of the kernels.
Place the mixture into a barrel, ensuring it is quite full.
Add sugar according to the amount of juice produced.

Ferment

Cover the barrel with vine leaves and sand.
Let it stand for about three weeks until fermentation is complete.
Stop the barrel with a bung.

Bottle

Bottle the wine after two months.

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.

Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Cherries: Provide the main fruit juice that ferments into the wine's body and flavour.
Currants: Add extra acidity and fruity aroma to the fermenting juice.
Sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbonation-free sweetness balance.

“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.