Name: Rennet Liquid
Ingredients: 12 oz fresh rennet; 2 oz salt; 2 oz proof spirit; 1 quart white wine

Why it works: Spirit and white wine work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Rennet Liquid

Ingredients

12 oz fresh rennet
2 oz salt
2 oz proof spirit
1 quart white wine

Directions

Prepare

Wash, salt, and dry the stomach of a calf.

Make the rennet

Combine fresh rennet, salt, proof spirit, and white wine in a container.
Let the mixture digest for 24 hours.
Strain the liquid before use.

Use

Use 2 to 3 teaspoons of the liquid for a quart of milk.

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.

Spirit + white winetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together20 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

Fresh rennet: Contains the enzymes that clot milk proteins, setting the milk into curd.
Proof spirit: Acts as a preservative that helps keep the liquid stable during digestion.
White wine: Serves as the liquid base that extracts and carries the rennet enzymes.

“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.