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Elderberry Wine

A fermented beverage made from elderberries, sugar, cinnamon, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Elderberry Wine

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Elderberry Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pour boiling water over elderberries and let it stand for 10 to 12 hours, stirring occasionally.

  2. Strain the mixture, pressing out all the juice.

Make the must

  1. For every 4 quarts of juice, add 3 pounds of sugar, 1 ounce of cinnamon, and ½ ounce of cloves.

  2. Boil the mixture for 5 minutes.

  3. Transfer to a stone jar and cover lightly with a cloth to ferment in a warm place for 3 weeks.

Rack and bottle

  1. After fermentation, rack off carefully to avoid disturbing the lees.

  2. Bottle and seal well.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Elderberries
Provide the main flavour, colour and the juice that becomes the wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and adds sweetness that balances the wine's acidity.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aromatic spice that flavours the wine.
Cloves
Adds a strong aromatic spice note to the wine.

The step that matters

Rack off carefully after fermentation. Fermentation leaves sediment called lees at the bottom. Disturbing it stirs solids back into the wine, making it cloudy and rough-tasting, so the wine should be siphoned off gently.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits about as well
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Allspicefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon. 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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