Skip to main content
Drink

Wine, Strawberry

A fermented beverage made from strawberries, cider, water, sugar, tartar, citrus rinds, and optional brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Wine, Strawberry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Bruise and press out the juice from the strawberries.

  2. Pour 7 gallons of water over the marc and infuse for 12 hours.

  3. Press out the liquid and mix it with the strawberry juice and 6 gallons of cider.

Make the must

  1. Dissolve 16 pounds of raw sugar and 3 ounces of powdered red tartar in the mixture.

  2. Set the mixture to ferment in the usual manner.

  3. Pare the rinds of 2 lemons and 2 oranges, add them along with their juice to the fermenting tub.

  4. Remove the rinds after fermentation is complete.

  5. Optionally, add 3 gallons of brandy.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Cider + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  3. Orange + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,706 recipes

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

  4. Cider + orangetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. 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

Strawberries
Provide the main fruit flavour and aroma of the wine.
Raw sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and sets the final sweetness and alcohol level.
Cider
Adds fermentable sugars and body, supporting the fermentation.
Powdered red tartar
Adds acidity, giving the wine tartness and balance against the sugar.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cider, sugar, orange, brandy):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cider, sugar, orange, brandy. 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.

You might also like

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipes