Name: Rich Raspberry Wins or Brandy
Ingredients: 4 cups ripe raspberries; 1 pound fine powdered sugar; 2 quarts sherry or 1 quart cognac brandy

Why it works: Sugar and sherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,141 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Rich Raspberry Wins or Brandy

Ingredients

4 cups ripe raspberries
1 pound fine powdered sugar
2 quarts sherry or 1 quart cognac brandy

Directions

Prepare the juice

Bruise the raspberries with a spoon.
Strain the juice through a flannel bag into a stone jar.
Add the powdered sugar to the juice and stir well.

Steep and bottle

Cover the jar and let it stand for three days, stirring each day.
Pour off the clear liquid.
Add the sherry or cognac to the juice and bottle it.

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 + sherrytop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,141 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Raspberries: Supply the main fruit flavour and colour, with their juice forming the base of the wine.
Powdered sugar: Dissolves readily into the juice, adding sweetness and feeding fermentation.
Sherry or cognac: Added spirit that fortifies the liquid, adding alcohol, aroma and preservation.

“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.