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Drink

Elder Wine

A fermented beverage made from berries, water, sugar, spices, toast, yeast, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Elder Wine

Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Elder Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Boil the berries in water for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the liquid through a fine sieve and measure the juice.

Make the must

  1. Add ¾ pound of sugar to each quart of juice and boil for 15 minutes with spices.

  2. Pour the mixture into a warm tub.

  3. When warm, add a piece of toast and yeast to ferment.

Ferment and seal

  1. Once fermentation stops, add a little brandy and seal the container.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Pepper + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Clove + brandytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,362 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger 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

Berries
Provide the main flavour, colour and fruit juice for the wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, which produces alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Yeast
Ferments the sugars in the juice into alcohol.
Brandy
Added after fermentation stops to raise the alcohol content and fortify the wine.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast while the mixture is warm. Yeast works best at moderate warmth. If the mixture is too hot it can kill the yeast, and if it is too cold fermentation starts slowly or not at all, so the wine may stall or spoil.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pepper, clove, brandy. 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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