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Drink

French Dried Fruit Water

A beverage made by boiling water with dried figs, apples, lemon peel, and optionally a bitter almond.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Fig and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 238 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

French Dried Fruit Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil 3 pints of water.

  2. Add a handful of sliced dry figs.

  3. Add 3 sliced apples and a small quantity of thinly cut lemon peel or 1 bitter almond.

Simmer and serve

  1. Simmer slowly for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the liquid and serve warm or cold.

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.

  1. Fig + appletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together238 recipes

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

  2. Fig + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Dried figs
Release sweetness and a mellow fruity flavour into the water.
Apples
Add natural sweetness, body and a gentle fruity aroma to the liquid.
Lemon peel
Adds a bright, aromatic citrus note to the infusion.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly for 30 minutes. Gentle simmering extracts flavour from the figs, apples and peel without boiling hard, which can make the liquid cloudy and taste bitter from the peel and almond.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fig, apple):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fig, apple. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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