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English Champagne

A homemade sparkling wine made with water, sugar, currants, yeast, and isinglass.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

English Champagne

Ingredients

Directions

Make the must

  1. Boil water and sugar for 30 minutes.

  2. Skim the mixture clean.

  3. Pour the boiling mixture over the currants and let it cool.

  4. Work the mixture for 2 days with ale yeast.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Strain through a flannel bag into a clean cask.

  2. Add isinglass finings and let it ferment.

  3. After fermentation, bung it and let it stand for 1 month.

  4. Bottle it, adding a small lump 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 + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Raw sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol and carbonation.
Currants
Supply fruit flavour, acidity and natural nutrients that feed the fermentation.
Ale yeast
Converts sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Isinglass finings
Clears the wine by drawing suspended yeast and particles down to settle.
Loaf-sugar
Adds a small amount of sugar to each bottle to feed renewed fermentation for sparkle.

The step that matters

Bottle with loaf-sugar after the cask has stood. Sugar added to bottles restarts fermentation that traps carbon dioxide, so it must be added only after the wine has finished fermenting and clarified. Too much sugar can build enough pressure to burst bottles.

“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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