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Drink

To Make Pearl Gooseberry Wine

A fermented beverage made from ripe gooseberries, sugar, water, and isinglass.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,079 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

To Make Pearl Gooseberry Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Bruise the gooseberries in a tub with a wooden pestle and let them stand overnight.

  2. Press and squeeze the mixture through a fine sieve and let the liquid sit for 7-8 hours.

  3. Pour the clear liquid away from the sediments.

Make the wine

  1. For every 3 pints of liquid, add 1 pound of sugar and stir until dissolved.

  2. Add 5 pints of water and 2 more pounds of sugar.

  3. Dissolve ½ ounce of isinglass in 1 pint of boiled liquid and add it to the mixture.

  4. Transfer everything to a cask, seal it, and let it sit for 3 months.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the wine, adding a lump of sugar to each bottle.

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. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe pear gooseberries
Provide the juice that becomes the wine's base flavour and fermentable sugars.
Double-refined sugar
Feeds fermentation and sets the wine's sweetness and body.
Isinglass
Fining agent that helps clear the wine by gathering suspended particles for settling.

“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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