Name: Sirup of Garlic
Ingredients: 1 pound garlic, sliced; 2 pints boiling water; coarse sugar, to taste

Why it works: Garlic and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,208 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Sirup of Garlic

Ingredients

1 pound garlic, sliced
2 pints boiling water
coarse sugar, to taste

Directions

Macerate the sliced garlic in a closed container with boiling water for 12 hours.
Strain the mixture to separate the liquid.
Dissolve the strained liquid in enough coarse sugar to create a syrup.

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.

Garlic + sugartop 33% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,208 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Garlic: Provides the pungent, aromatic flavour that is extracted into the liquid.
Coarse sugar: Adds sweetness and thickens the liquid into a syrup.

“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.