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Parsnip Wine, a Simple Way of Making

A fermented beverage made from boiled parsnips, water, sugar, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Parsnip and sugar work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 190 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Parsnip Wine, a Simple Way of Making

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the parsnips in water until soft.

  2. Strain and squeeze out the liquid.

Make the wine

  1. Add 3 pounds of sugar for every gallon of liquid.

  2. Boil for 45 minutes and let cool.

  3. Ferment with a little yeast on a toast.

  4. Let the liquid stand in a tub for 10 days, stirring daily.

Age

  1. Transfer to a cask and let it age for 6 to 7 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. Parsnip + sugartop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together190 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Parsnips
Provide the main flavour and body of the wine.
Lump sugar
Supplies sweetness and the sugar that yeast turns into alcohol.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Add the sugar in the right amount. Sugar is the fuel for the yeast. Too little gives a weak, dry wine with little alcohol, while too much can stall fermentation and leave the wine overly sweet.

“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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