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British Champagne

A fermented beverage made from water, sugar, currants, yeast, and finings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and white currant work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. The science ↓

British Champagne

Ingredients

Directions

Make the liquor

  1. Boil the water and sugar together for half an hour.

  2. Skim the mixture clean.

  3. Pour the hot liquid over the white currants, ensuring they are picked from the stalks but not bruised.

  4. When the mixture is cold, ferment it for two days with the ale yeast.

Clarify and age

  1. Pass the mixture through a flannel bag into a clean cask, adding the isinglass finings.

  2. When fermentation is complete, seal the cask for a month.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the champagne, adding a bit of loaf sugar to each bottle.

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 + white curranttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Provides the sugar that the yeast ferments into alcohol and carbonation.
Ale yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
White currants
Contribute fruit flavour and acidity to the liquor.
Isinglass finings
Collects suspended particles so the liquid clears as it settles.

The step that matters

Pour the hot liquid over the white currants without bruising them. Bruised currants release harsh, bitter compounds and cloudy pulp into the liquor, which affects flavour and clarity. Keeping the fruit whole limits this extraction.

“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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