Skip to main content
Drink

White Elder Wine, Very Mucti Like Frontiniac

A fermented wine made from elderflowers, sugar, water, egg whites, lemon juice, yeast, and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,481 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

White Elder Wine, Very Mucti Like Frontiniac

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar with water and beaten egg whites.

  2. Skim the mixture and add the elderflowers; do not keep on the fire.

Ferment

  1. When near cold, stir in the lemon juice and yeast, mixing well.

  2. Stir the mixture every day.

  3. Add the stoned raisins to the cask and ferment the wine.

Bottle

  1. Seal the cask and bottle the wine in six months.

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 + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Lemon + raisintop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

White powdered sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol and gives the wine its sweetness.
Egg whites
When boiled and skimmed, they gather impurities and cloud particles so the liquid clears.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and helps keep the fermentation balanced.
Yeast
Converts the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Raisins
Add fermentable sugar, body and fruity flavour to the wine.

The step that matters

Skim the mixture and add the elderflowers; do not keep on the fire.. Keeping the flowers over heat can extract bitter, harsh flavours and drive off their delicate aroma. Removing the coagulated egg white foam clears the liquid.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, raisin):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, raisin. 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.

You might also like

Raisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipes