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Drink

Wine, Ginger

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Wine, Ginger

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Boil the sugar in the water until no scum rises.

  2. Peel the oranges and lemons, then add them along with the ginger tied in a muslin bag.

  3. Boil all together for 1 hour.

  4. Remove into a tub and let it cool until lukewarm.

Ferment and clear

  1. Add 2 tablespoons of yeast spread on pieces of toast.

  2. Let it stand until the next day, then transfer to a cask with the juice of the oranges and lemons.

  3. Stir every day for 10 days.

  4. Add isinglass to clear it and the raisins, then seal the cask.

  5. It will be ready to use in 2 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Orange + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, turning the syrup into wine.
Demerara sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast converts to alcohol, and sweetness in the finished wine.
Isinglass
Fining agent that gathers suspended particles so the wine clears.
Ginger
Supplies the characteristic warm, spicy aroma and flavour.
Raisins
Add body, fruity sweetness and nutrients for the yeast during fermentation.

The step that matters

Cooling the syrup to lukewarm before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by high heat, so the syrup must be cooled to lukewarm before the yeast is added; too hot and fermentation will fail.

Swap the raisin

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

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

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