Name: Green Apple Wine
Ingredients: 1 gallon spring water; 1 gallon mashed green apples; 3 pounds loaf sugar, pounded or broken up; 1 ounce isinglass

Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Green Apple Wine

Ingredients

1 gallon spring water
1 gallon mashed green apples
3 pounds loaf sugar, pounded or broken up
1 ounce isinglass

Directions

Make the must

Bruise the apples well and mix with the spring water.
Stir the mixture two to three times a day for five days.
Strain the mixture and add the pounded sugar to the strained liquid.

Cask and bottle

Once the sugar is dissolved, pour the wine into a wine cask.
Beat the isinglass in some of the liquid and add it to the cask.
Bottle the wine after eight 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.

Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together16,478 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Green apples: Provide the fruit juice and flavour that the wine is made from.
Loaf sugar: Feeds the yeast, which turns sugar into alcohol, and adds sweetness.
Isinglass: A fining agent that helps clear the wine by settling suspended particles.

“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.