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Drink

Red or White Elder Wine

A fermented beverage made from ripe elderberries, water, sugar, and optionally isinglass and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Red or White Elder Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick the elderberries when fully ripe and place them in a stone jar.

  2. Heat the jar in an oven or boiling water until hot throughout.

  3. Strain the berries through a coarse sieve, wringing them to extract juice.

Make the wine

  1. Pour the juice into a clean kettle and add 1 pound of sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture and skim off any foam until clear.

  3. Pour the wine into a cask and add 1 ounce of dissolved isinglass and 6 whole eggs if desired.

Age and bottle

  1. Seal the cask and let it stand for 6 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 + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Elderberries
Provide the juice, colour and fruity flavour that form the base of the wine.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and feeds the fermentation that produces alcohol.
Isinglass
Acts as a fining agent that helps the wine settle and clear.

The step that matters

Skimming the boiled juice. Foam rising on the boiling juice carries impurities and proteins that would cloud the finished wine. Skimming until the liquid is clear removes them, so the wine stays bright and clean-tasting.

“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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