Why it works: Sugar and gin work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 344 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓
Gooseberry Wine, Effervescing
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the fruit
Cut the tops and stalks from the gooseberries and bruise them thoroughly.
Add 1 quart of cold spring water for every pound of fruit and leave for 3‑4 days, stirring frequently.
Strain and sweeten
Strain through a sieve and add 3 pounds of loaf sugar for every gallon of liquid.
Once the sugar is dissolved, transfer the liquid into a cask.
Finish and bottle
Add 1 bottle of gin and ¼ ounce of isinglass for every 5 gallons of wine.
Bottle the wine in about 6 months, or longer if not clear.
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.
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Sugar + gintop 19% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together344 recipes
Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Green gooseberries
- Provide the main fruit flavour and the tartness that balances the sugar.
- Loaf sugar
- Adds sweetness and provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol.
- Gin
- Adds alcohol, which raises strength and helps preserve the finished wine.
- Isinglass
- A fining agent that gathers suspended particles so the wine clears.
- Cold spring water
- Extracts flavour from the bruised fruit and makes up the liquid volume.
The step that matters
Bottle the wine in about 6 months, or longer if not clear.. Isinglass needs time to settle haze and particles out of the wine. Bottling before it is clear traps sediment and can leave the wine cloudy or still fermenting.
“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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