Name: Chili, or Cayenne Wine
Ingredients: 50 fresh red chilies or ¼ ounce cayenne pepper; ½ pint brandy, white wine, or claret

Why it works: Pepper and brandy work together. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 934 recipes. Both carry 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol, which smells smoky, clove. The science ↓

Chili, or Cayenne Wine

Ingredients

50 fresh red chilies or ¼ ounce cayenne pepper
½ pint brandy, white wine, or claret

Directions

Pound and steep the chilies or cayenne pepper in the brandy, white wine, or claret.
Let it steep for fourteen days.

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.

Pepper + brandytop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together934 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

What each ingredient does

Red chilies or cayenne pepper: Provides the heat and pepper flavour that the liquid draws out during steeping.
Brandy, white wine, or claret: Acts as the steeping liquid, extracting flavour and heat from the chilies over time.

“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.