Name: Blackbekby Wine
Ingredients: boiling water; fruit; 2 pounds sugar per gallon of liquor; isinglass (½ ounce for every 3 gallons of wine)

Why it works: Sugar and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,581 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Blackbekby Wine

Ingredients

boiling water
fruit
2 pounds sugar per gallon of liquor
isinglass (½ ounce for every 3 gallons of wine)

Directions

Prepare the juice

Pour boiling water over the fruit and let it cool.
Bruise the fruit and let it sit until the berries rise to the top.
Drain off the clear liquid and measure it.

Ferment and clarify

Add 2 pounds of sugar for every gallon of liquid and stir well.
Let it stand uncovered for a week or ten days.
Draw off the wine and strain it through a jelly bag.
Dissolve ½ ounce of isinglass in a little of the wine for every 3 gallons and mix it in.

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 + winetop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together9,581 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar: Sweetens the wine and provides the fuel for fermentation.
Isinglass: Fining agent that helps clear the wine by settling out 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.