Skip to main content
Drink

Champagne, English

A fermented beverage made from yellow hairy gooseberries, sugar, gin, and optional isinglass, aged for a year.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and gin work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 344 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Champagne, English

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Select fully grown but unripe yellow hairy gooseberries, discarding any unsound or bruised fruit.

  2. Remove stalks and heads.

  3. Bruise the gooseberries in a clean tub to burst the berries without breaking the seeds.

  4. Pour 1 gallon of water over the bruised fruit and let it stand in a warm place for 48 hours, stirring frequently.

  5. Strain the liquid, pressing the pulp with a wooden spoon until dry.

Make the wine

  1. Mix the strained liquid with 4 pounds of coarse sugar and let it stand for 3 more days, stirring frequently.

  2. Strain the mixture through a coarse bag into a cask and add 1 cup of best gin.

  3. Let it stand for 12 months, then bottle it in the spring.

  4. If not clear, fine it with ½ ounce of isinglass for 4 gallons.

  5. After sealing the bottles, make a vent-hole in the cask.

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 + gintop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together344 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Gooseberries
Provide the main fruit flavour, acidity and juice that become the wine.
Coarse sugar
Feeds the fermentation and leaves sweetness and body in the finished drink.
Best gin
Added to the cask as a spirit that stabilises and preserves the wine.
Isinglass
Fining agent that helps settle haze so the finished drink becomes clear.

The step that matters

Pressing the pulp until dry. Squeezing the pulp hard extracts the remaining juice, which carries much of the fruit's acid and flavour. Stopping early leaves value behind, while pressing so hard that bits of skin and seed are forced through can add bitterness and cloudiness.

“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

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes