Name: Elder Syrup
Ingredients: 1 quart elderberries; ½ pint water; 1 pound brown sugar; 1 teaspoon bruised ginger

Why it works: Sugar and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Elder Syrup

Ingredients

1 quart elderberries
½ pint water
1 pound brown sugar
1 teaspoon bruised ginger

Directions

Prepare the berries

Pick the berries from the stalks and place them in an earthen pot.
Add ½ pint of water for each quart of berries and cover the pot.
Place the pot in the oven until the berries are sufficiently stewed to extract the juice.

Make the syrup

For every pint of syrup, add 1 pound of brown sugar and 1 teaspoon of bruised ginger.
Boil the mixture for 30 minutes, then let it cool.

Bottle and store

Bottle the syrup, cork it tightly, and store it 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.

Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together14,054 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Elderberries: Provide the main flavour and the juice that becomes the syrup base.
Brown sugar: Sweetens the syrup and thickens it as it boils down.
Water: Helps the berries stew and release their juice.

“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.