Name: Green Gooseberry Wine
Ingredients: 35 quarts unripe green gooseberries; 32 quarts cold water; 3½ lbs lump sugar; 1 bottle best gin

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 ↓

Green Gooseberry Wine

Ingredients

35 quarts unripe green gooseberries
32 quarts cold water
3½ lbs lump sugar
1 bottle best gin

Directions

Prepare the gooseberries

Bruise the gooseberries well.
Add the cold water and let the mixture stand for 24 hours.
Drain the gooseberries through a sieve.

Sweeten and age

Add 3½ lbs of lump sugar for every gallon of liquor.
Transfer the mixture into a cask and add the gin.
Let it stand for 6 months, then bottle it.

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.

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 and the acidity that gives the wine its bite.
Lump sugar: Sweetens the wine and feeds the fermentation that turns sugar into alcohol.
Gin: Adds spirit strength and aroma, helping preserve the wine during long ageing.

“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.