Skip to main content
Drink

Hollands Gin

A gin made by infusing juniper berries, fennel seeds, and caraway seeds in rectified wine spirit, then blending with corn spirit and turpentine.

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

Why it works: Fennel and caraway share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 51 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Hollands Gin

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Digest the juniper berries in 1 to 2 gallons of rectified spirit of wine for 7 to 10 days.

  2. Express the liquor and filter it through blotting paper.

  3. Mix the filtered liquor with 40 to 100 gallons of good corn spirit by thorough agitation.

  4. Add sweet fennel seeds, caraway seeds, and a little Strasburg turpentine.

  5. Allow the mixture to mellow for some time before consuming.

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. Fennel + carawaytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Spirit + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together701 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  3. Fennel + corntop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Caraway + corntop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Caraway + spirittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Juniper berries
Provide the characteristic piney, resinous flavour that defines gin.
Sweet fennel seeds
Add a sweet, anise-like aroma to the spirit.
Caraway seeds
Add an earthy, spiced aroma to the spirit.
Corn spirit
Serves as the neutral alcoholic base that carries the botanical flavours.

The step that matters

Mixing the filtered liquor into the corn spirit. Thorough agitation distributes the concentrated juniper extract evenly through the large volume of base spirit. Uneven mixing leaves some portions strongly flavoured and others weak, so the final gin tastes inconsistent.

Swap the caraway

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fennel, spirit, wine, corn):

  1. Rosemaryfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Carawaythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fennel, spirit, wine, corn. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Wine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipesElderberry WineElderberry Wine51 recipes