Name: Barberry Water Ice
Ingredients: 2 lbs ripe barberries; ½ cup water; 1 pint thick syrup; a few drops vanilla extract; a few drops cochineal

Why it works: Syrup and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,855 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Barberry Water Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

Boil barberries with water in a sugar boiler.
Press the mixture through a strainer.

Make the ice

Mix the juice, syrup, vanilla, and cochineal.
Freeze the mixture.
Incorporate the whole and freeze again.
Mold the ice.

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.

Syrup + vanillatop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,855 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Barberries: Provide the tart, fruity flavour and the red juice that colours the ice.
Syrup: Adds sweetness and softens the texture by lowering the freezing point.

“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.