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Drink

Bilberry Wine

A fermented beverage made from bilberries, water, sugar, treacle, lime juice, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lime are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,332 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Bilberry Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquor

  1. Boil the water with sugar and treacle, then skim it well.

  2. Add lime juice to the boiling mixture.

Mash and ferment

  1. Mash the bilberries in a fermenting tub.

  2. Pour the boiling liquor over the mashed berries.

  3. Ferment with yeast until fermentation ceases.

  4. Remove the head.

Strain and cask

  1. Strain the liquor and fruit.

  2. Transfer the liquid into a clean brandy cask.

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 + limetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Bilberries
Provide the main fruit flavour, colour and body of the wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, producing alcohol during fermentation and adding sweetness.
Yeast
Converts the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Raw lime juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and helps keep the wine stable.
Treacle
Adds extra fermentable sugar along with a deeper, rich flavour.

The step that matters

Skim the boiling water with sugar and treacle. Skimming removes impurities that rise to the surface as the syrup boils, which keeps off-flavours out of the finished wine. Thorough skimming gives a cleaner, clearer result.

“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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