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To Make Lemon-Wine to Drink Like CiTRON-Water

A fermented beverage made from lemon peels, brandy, sugar, water, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Make Lemon-Wine to Drink Like CiTRON-Water

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the infusion

  1. Pare the lemons very thin and place the peels in the brandy. Let them stand for 14 days.

Make the syrup and ferment

  1. Boil the water with 40 pounds of sugar for 30 minutes, then cool it in a tub.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of barm to the cooled mixture and let it work for 2 days.

Combine and age

  1. Combine the brandy, peels, and syrup with the mixture, stir well, and close the cask.

  2. Let it stand for 3 months, then 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.

  1. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  2. Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Lemon and sugar 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

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Their peel supplies the aromatic oils and bright citrus flavour that define the wine.
French brandy
Steeps the lemon peel to extract its oils and adds spirit strength and warmth.
Sugar
Feeds the fermentation and provides sweetness that balances the lemon's acidity.
Barm
Yeast culture that starts the fermentation converting sugar into alcohol.

The step that matters

Cooling the syrup before adding the barm. Yeast is killed or stressed by hot liquid, so the boiled sugar water must be fully cooled before the barm is added to start fermentation safely.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against brandy, sugar. 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.

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