Name: Ginger Wine
Ingredients: 3 teaspoons essence of ginger; 2 teaspoons essence of cayenne; ½ ounce tartaric acid; 3 pounds granulated sugar; 3 quarts boiling water; 3 tablespoons sugar; ½ cup water

Why it works: Ginger and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Ginger Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

In a small saucepan, brown 3 tablespoons of sugar with ½ cup of water.

Make the wine

In a large kettle, combine essence of ginger, essence of cayenne, tartaric acid, and granulated sugar.
Pour 3 quarts of boiling water over the mixture.
Stir well and let it cool.

Bottle

Bottle the mixture when it is 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.

Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Essence of ginger: Supplies the main ginger flavour that defines the drink.
Granulated sugar: Provides sweetness and body, and helps balance the sharpness of the acid.
Tartaric acid: Adds sharpness that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Essence of cayenne: Adds a background heat that complements the ginger.

“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.