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Drink

Ginger Wine

A fermented beverage made from lemons, ginger, sugar, raisins, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Ginger Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Peel the lemons very thinly and combine with the bruised ginger.

  2. In a pot, mix the sugar with water and boil until the scum rises, then remove the scum.

  3. Add the lemon peel and ginger to the boiling mixture and boil for another 30 minutes.

Cool and ferment

  1. Pour the mixture into a tub and let it cool until it's slightly warmer than milk.

  2. Add the lemon juice and chopped raisins to the cooled mixture.

  3. Transfer the liquid to a cask and stir in the yeast.

  4. Fill the cask once a day for six days.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Ginger + raisintop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,242 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

Ginger and sugar 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

Yeast
Converts the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Loaf sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol, and adds sweetness.
White ginger
Adds the sharp, warm aroma and flavor that defines the wine.
Raisins
Add natural sugars and nutrients that help feed the fermentation.

The step that matters

Cooling before adding yeast. The mixture must be only slightly warmer than milk before yeast is stirred in. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, while a cooler liquid slows fermentation, so the temperature must be right for the yeast to start working.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Raisinthe original

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