Name: Strawberries in Wine
Ingredients: finest and largest strawberries; 4 tablespoons pulverized loaf sugar; Madeira or Sherry wine

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 ↓

Strawberries in Wine

Ingredients

finest and largest strawberries
4 tablespoons pulverized loaf sugar
Madeira or Sherry wine

Directions

Prepare

Stem the strawberries and place them in wide-mouthed pint bottles.
Add 4 tablespoons of pulverized sugar to each bottle.

Macerate and store

Fill the bottles with Madeira or Sherry wine.
Cork the bottles tightly and store them in a cool place.

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

Strawberries: Provide the fruit flavor and texture that the wine and sugar soften and infuse.
Pulverized loaf sugar: Sweetens the wine and draws juice out of the strawberries as they steep.
Madeira or sherry wine: Supplies the liquid and the fortified wine flavor that soaks into the fruit.

“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.