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Drink

Elder Blossom Wine

A fermented beverage made from elder blossoms, water, sugar, yeast, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓

Elder Blossom Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clip the blossoms from the stems.

  2. Pour 1 gallon of boiling water over the blossoms and let it stand for 24 hours.

Ferment

  1. Strain the mixture and add 3 pounds of sugar, ½ cake yeast, and 1 sliced lemon.

  2. Let it stand for a few weeks until fermentation ceases.

Bottle

  1. Skim the surface and bottle the wine.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Elder blossoms
Supply the floral aroma and flavor that the steeping water carries into the wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, and the sugar left over sets how sweet the finished wine tastes.
Yeast
Converts the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Lemon
Adds acidity and brightness that balance the sweetness and floral notes.

The step that matters

Bottle only after fermentation ceases. Yeast keeps converting leftover sugar while fermentation is active. Bottling early can trap carbon dioxide, which may build pressure and burst bottles, so wait until bubbling has stopped before bottling.

“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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