Name: Cheese in Wine and Beer
Ingredients: ½ cup Bordeaux wine; ½ cup good beer; cheese

Why it works: Wine and beer work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 89 recipes. Both carry 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one, which smells catty, blackcurrant. The science ↓

Cheese in Wine and Beer

Ingredients

½ cup Bordeaux wine
½ cup good beer
cheese

Directions

Place the cheese in a soup plate.
Mix equal quantities of Bordeaux wine and good beer.
Dip a napkin in the mixture and wring it out, leaving it moist.
Wrap the napkin tightly around the cheese.
Store the wrapped cheese in a wine cellar.
Repeat this process every week until the cheese is used.

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.

Wine + beertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together89 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one (catty, blackcurrant).
Beer + cheesetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together174 recipes

Shared aroma: 5-ethyl-3-hydroxy-4-methyl-2(5h)-furanone (spice).
Wine + cheesetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together651 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).