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 ↓
Gooseberry Wine, Effervescing
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the fruit
Remove the tops and stalks from the gooseberries and bruise them thoroughly.
Add 1 quart of cold spring water for every pound of fruit and leave for 3 to 4 days, stirring frequently.
Strain the mixture through a sieve.
Make and age the wine
Add 3 pounds of loaf sugar for every gallon of liquid and stir until dissolved.
Transfer the liquid into a cask, adding 1 bottle of gin and ¼ ounce of isinglass for every 5 gallons of wine.
Let it sit for about 6 months; if not clear, allow it to remain longer.
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.
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Sugar + gintop 19% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Green gooseberries
- Provide the tart fruit flavour and the natural sugars and acids that the wine is built on.
- Loaf sugar
- Adds sweetness and feeds fermentation, which produces alcohol in the wine.
- Gin
- Adds spirit strength and helps preserve the finished wine.
- Isinglass
- Acts as a fining agent that draws out haze so the wine clears in the cask.
The step that matters
Letting the wine clear. Isinglass only clears haze when given time to settle, so rushing the cask before the wine is bright can leave it cloudy. Waiting longer lets suspended particles drop out.
“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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