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Drink

Blackberry Wine

A fermented beverage made from ripe blackberries, water, sugar, raisins, and a touch of cider.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit and syrup

  1. Crush the blackberries by hand.

  2. Boil the water with sugar for 30 minutes.

  3. Skim the mixture well and pour it over the blackberries.

  4. Let it stand overnight.

Strain and cask

  1. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

  2. Add the chopped raisins to a cask.

  3. Pour the strained wine into the cask with a little cider and seal it.

Age

  1. Let it stand for 6 months before bottling.

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).

  2. Raisin + cidertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together588 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Sugar + cidertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,308 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

Blackberries
Supply the main fruit flavour and deep colour of the wine.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol.
Raisins
Add body and extra fruit flavour to the cask.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Applefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cider. 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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