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Drink

Wine Making

A fermented berry beverage made by boiling juice with sugar, cloves, ginger, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and ginger 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 ↓

Wine Making

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Strain the juice from the berries through a sieve or cloth.

  2. Squeeze the remaining juice from the berries and mix it with the strained juice.

Make the wine

  1. Measure the total juice and add 3 pounds of sugar, ¾ ounce of cloves, and 1 ounce of ginger for every gallon.

  2. Boil the mixture for 20 minutes, stirring constantly.

  3. When slightly warmer than milk, pour it into a clean, dry cask or large stone bottles.

  4. Add a large spoonful of new yeast to the mixture and stir it in.

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. Clove + gingertop 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

Sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
New yeast
Ferments the sugars in the juice, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast when the mixture is only slightly warmer than milk. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the mixture must cool to a warm, not hot, temperature before the yeast goes in. Adding yeast too early 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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