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Ripe Gooseberry Wine

A fermented beverage made from ripe gooseberries, water, sugar, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Brandy and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,427 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Ripe Gooseberry Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wine

  1. Bruise the gooseberries and add them to the soft water and loaf sugar in an open tub.

  2. Stir until the sugar is dissolved.

  3. Let the mixture ferment for 14 days until the refuse separates.

  4. Make a hole 2 inches from the bottom of the tub and draw off the clear liquor.

Age and bottle

  1. Transfer the liquor to a cask and add brandy.

  2. Let it stand for 5 to 6 months, then bottle it.

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. Brandy + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + winetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

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

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Gooseberries
Provide the fruit flavor and the sugar-fermenting base of the wine.
Loaf sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbonation.
Soft water
Dissolves the sugar and forms the liquid base for fermentation.
Brandy
Raises the alcohol content and helps preserve the wine during aging.

The step that matters

Draw off the clear liquor before transferring. Fermentation leaves solids that settle as refuse. Drawing off only the clear liquid from above the sediment keeps cloudiness and off-flavors out of the finished wine.

“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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