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Sham-champagne

A homemade sparkling wine made from lemon, ginger, tartaric acid, sugar, water, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger 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 in a large container.

  3. Boil the water and pour it over the mixture.

  4. Let it stand until cooled to blood heat.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Add the yeast and let it sit in the sun for a day.

  2. At night, bottle the mixture, tying the corks.

  3. It will be ready to use in two days.

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 + gingertop 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. Lemon + sugartop 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

Yeast
Ferments the sugar, producing carbon dioxide that makes the drink fizzy.
White sugar
Feeds the yeast and provides the sweetness of the finished drink.
Tartaric acid
Adds tartness that balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Lemon
Contributes acidity and citrus aroma to the flavour.
Ginger root
Adds a spicy aroma to the drink.

The step that matters

Cooling the water to blood heat before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the water must be cooled to a warm, around body temperature, before the yeast goes in. If it is too hot, fermentation may fail to start.

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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