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Drink

Parsnip Wine

A fermented beverage made from boiled parsnip pulp, sugar, and yeast, aged in a cask.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquid

  1. Slice the parsnips and add them to the water in a pot.

  2. Boil the mixture until the parsnips become a pulp.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve back into the pot.

  4. Add the sugar to the strained liquid and boil for 1 hour.

Ferment and age

  1. Once tepid, add a slice of toast covered with yeast to the liquid.

  2. Cover the pot and keep it in a warm place until fermentation begins.

  3. Transfer the liquid to a cask, removing the toast.

  4. Do not rack the wine until autumn and do not bottle it for at least a year.

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 bulk of the flavour and body once boiled to a pulp.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and provides sweetness and alcohol.
Yeast
Converts the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.

The step that matters

Keep the liquid warm until fermentation begins. Yeast works best at moderate warmth; a liquid that is too hot can kill it, while one that is too cold ferments slowly or not at all, so the wine may not start properly.

“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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