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Drink

Elder-Wine

A fermented beverage made from elderberries, sugar, ginger, cloves, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Elder-Wine

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Put the elderberries into a pot or jar and let them stand overnight in a cool oven.

Make the wine

  1. Mix the quart of elderberry juice with the water and add the sugar, ginger, and cloves.

  2. Boil the mixture for 45 minutes.

  3. Let it cool, then add yeast and spread it on toast.

  4. Allow it to work for 24 hours.

  5. Transfer the mixture into a cask and lightly put in the bung until fermentation is complete.

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. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Elderberries
Provide the fruit flavour and colour that the juice carries into the wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and provides the sweetness and alcohol in the finished wine.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, turning the juice into wine.

The step that matters

Let it cool before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the mixture must cool after boiling before the yeast is added. Adding it while hot can stop fermentation before it starts.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger. 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.

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