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A Delicious Cheap Wine for Cooking or Drinking

A cheap wine made by boiling cider with honey, then aging for several weeks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Cider and honey work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 256 recipes. Both carry ethyl decanoate, which smells grape, waxy. The science ↓

A Delicious Cheap Wine for Cooking or Drinking

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wine

  1. Take new cider from the press.

  2. Mix in enough honey to support an egg in the liquid.

  3. Boil gently for 15 minutes in a non-metal pot. Skim the mixture well.

  4. Let it cool, then transfer to a cask.

Age and bottle

  1. In March, it will be ready to bottle.

  2. After six weeks, it will be fit to drink.

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. Cider + honeytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together256 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl decanoate (grape, waxy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

New cider
Provides the fermentable base liquid that becomes the wine.
Honey
Adds fermentable sugar and sweetness, raising the alcohol potential of the wine.

The step that matters

Boil gently and skim. Boiling gently, rather than vigorously, keeps the honey and cider flavours fresh, and skimming removes the foam and particles that rise to the surface. Boiling in a non-metal pot avoids reactions between the acidic liquid and the metal.

“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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