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Parsnip Wine, a Simple Way of Making

A fermented beverage made from boiled parsnips, water, sugar, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsnip and sugar work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 190 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Parsnip Wine, a Simple Way of Making

Ingredients

Directions

Make the liquid

  1. Boil the parsnips in water until soft.

  2. Strain and squeeze out the liquid.

  3. Add 3 pounds of sugar for every gallon of liquid.

  4. Boil for 45 minutes and let cool.

Ferment and age

  1. Ferment with a little yeast on a toast.

  2. Let the liquid stand for 10 days, stirring daily.

  3. After 10 days, transfer to a cask.

  4. The wine will be ready for bottling in 6 to 7 months.

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. Parsnip + sugartop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together190 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Parsnips
Provide the flavour and body of the wine, along with the sugars that yeast ferments.
Lump sugar
Feeds the yeast, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Yeast
Converts the sugars in the liquid into alcohol during fermentation.

The step that matters

Ferment with a little yeast on a toast. Yeast needs a healthy, evenly mixed liquid to start fermenting well. Spreading it on a toast is an old method, and the yeast must be well distributed and active for fermentation to begin reliably.

“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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