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Wine, Ginger

A fermented beverage made from sugar, water, ginger, yeast, and optional lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Wine, Ginger

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve the sugar in boiling water.

  2. Add the bruised ginger-root and boil for about 15 minutes.

  3. For added flavor, boil the lemon rind with the ginger.

  4. Let the mixture cool nearly to room temperature.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Stir in the yeast and pour into a cask to ferment.

  2. Fill the cask with reserved liquor as needed.

  3. When fermentation ceases, rack off the wine.

  4. Bottle the wine when it is transparent.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and provides the sweetness and alcohol of the finished wine.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, turning the liquid into wine.
Bruised ginger-root
Releases its aroma and spicy flavor into the boiled liquid.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool nearly to room temperature before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed or slowed by very hot liquid, so the mixture must cool before the yeast is stirred in to ensure fermentation starts reliably.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, ginger):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Orangefits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Vanillafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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