Name: Apricot Wine
Ingredients: 3 pounds sugar; 3 quarts water; 6 pounds apricots, peeled and pitted

Why it works: Sugar and apricot 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

3 pounds sugar
3 quarts water
6 pounds apricots, peeled and pitted

Directions

Make the syrup

Boil sugar and water together, skimming well.
Add apricots and boil until tender.
Remove apricots and let the liquid cool.

Bottle

Optionally, boil the liquid with a sprig of flowered clary before bottling.
Bottle the cooled liquid.

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 + apricottop 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

Sugar: Provides sweetness and, once fermented, the alcohol that gives the wine its body.
Apricots: Supply the fruit flavour, aroma and colour that define the 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.