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Drink

Green Gooseberry Wine

A fermented beverage made from unripe green gooseberries, water, sugar, and gin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and gin work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 344 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Green Gooseberry Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bruise the gooseberries well.

  2. Add the cold water and let it stand for 24 hours.

  3. Drain the gooseberries from the liquid through a sieve.

Sweeten and cask

  1. Add 3.5 pounds of lump sugar for every gallon of liquid.

  2. Put the mixture into a cask with a bottle of gin.

Age and bottle

  1. Let it stand for 6 months, then bottle it.

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 + gintop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together344 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Unripe green gooseberries
Supply the tart acidity and fruit flavour that define the wine.
Lump sugar
Adds sweetness and provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol.
Gin
Raises the alcohol content, which helps preserve the wine during long storage.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar by liquid volume. Sugar sets both the sweetness and the fuel for fermentation. It should be measured against the actual volume of liquid rather than the fruit, so the balance of sweetness and alcohol is right.

“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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