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Blackberry Beverage

A sweet blackberry beverage made by steeping blackberries in boiling water, adding sugar, and fermenting with raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,481 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Blackberry Beverage

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Mash any quantity of blackberries.

  2. Cover the mashed blackberries with boiling water and let stand for 24 hours.

  3. Strain the mixture to extract the juice.

Sweeten and ferment

  1. For every gallon of juice, add 3 lbs of sugar.

  2. Put the juice in bottles, adding 1 raisin to each quart.

  3. Cover the bottles with a white cloth and change the cloth each morning for nine days.

  4. Keep the bottles overflowing by filling them each morning from an extra bottle of juice saved for this purpose.

  5. Cork the bottles gradually.

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 + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Blackberries
Provide the bulk of the juice and its flavor and color.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and feeds the fermentation that follows.
Raisins
Add wild yeasts and nutrients that help start fermentation in the bottles.

The step that matters

Keep the bottles overflowing. Filling each bottle daily from a saved extra bottle keeps air out of the juice. Oxygen exposure invites spoilage microbes and off flavors, so the topping-up matters during fermentation.

“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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