Skip to main content
Drink

Birch Wine

A fermented beverage made from birch sap, sugar, lemon peel, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and spread match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 260 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Birch Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Collect and boil the sap

  1. Bore holes in birch trees and insert elder branch hoses to collect sap.

  2. Boil the sap, skimming off any scum.

  3. Add 4 pounds of sugar and the lemon peel to each gallon of sap and boil for another 30 minutes, skimming well.

  4. Pour the mixture into a clean tub and let it cool.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Once cool, add yeast spread on toast and stir often for 5-6 days.

  2. Prepare a cask, light a match dipped in brimstone, and throw it in the cask before sealing it until the match extinguishes.

  3. Allow the wine to ferment for three 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 + spreadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Lemon + spreadtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together85 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl acetate (pineapple, fruity).

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

Birch sap
Forms the liquid base that the wine is made from.
Sugar
Provides the sweetness and the fuel that yeast turns into alcohol during fermentation.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Skimming during boiling. Scum rising from the sap contains impurities and proteins that can spoil flavour and cloud the finished wine. Removing it as it forms gives a cleaner, clearer result.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, spread. 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

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes