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Drink

Sham Champagne

A homemade fermented sparkling drink made with lemon, ginger, sugar, tartaric acid, yeast, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Sham Champagne

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the lemon and bruise the ginger.

  2. Mix the lemon, ginger, tartaric acid, and sugar together, leaving out the yeast.

  3. Boil 2½ gallons of water and pour it over the mixture.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Let the mixture cool to body heat, then add the yeast.

  2. Let it stand in the sun all day, then bottle it at night.

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. Ginger + sugartop 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).

Ginger and sugar 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

Brewer's yeast
Ferments the sugar, producing the carbonation and alcohol that make the drink fizzy.
White sugar
Provides the food for the yeast and the sweetness of the finished drink.
Tartaric acid
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and gives the drink its tang.
Lemon
Contributes citrus acidity and aroma to the flavour.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture to body heat before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid. Adding it only once the mixture has cooled to body temperature lets it survive and start fermenting.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, sugar. 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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