Skip to main content

Champagne, and Its Adulterations

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Grape and brandy work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 711 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Champagne, and Its Adulterations

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the sugar in the water for 2 hours, skimming occasionally.

  2. Pour the mixture into a tub and dissolve the acid in it before it cools.

  3. Add yeast and allow to ferment.

  4. Transfer to a clean cask and add the other ingredients.

  5. Seal the cask tightly and store 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.

  1. Grape + brandytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together711 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Lemon + grapetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,412 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Lemon + brandytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, grape, brandy):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, grape, brandy. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesGrape FrappeGrape Frappe10 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipes