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Wine, White Currant

A fermented wine made from white currants, sugar, water, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and white currant work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. The science ↓

Wine, White Currant

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil 6 gallons of water with 18 pounds of sugar for 30 minutes, skimming off the scum.

  2. Pour the boiling syrup over 2 gallons of picked white currants.

Ferment and clarify

  1. When the mixture cools to the temperature of new milk, add good ale yeast to ferment.

  2. Allow it to ferment for 2 days, then strain through a flannel bag into a barrel.

  3. Add ½ ounce of bruised isinglass to the barrel.

Bottle

  1. Once fermentation stops, bottle the wine and add a lump of double refined sugar to each bottle.

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. Sugar + white curranttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol and gives the wine its sweetness.
White currants
Supply the fruit flavour, acidity and juice that make up the body of the wine.
Ale yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, turning the syrup into wine.
Isinglass
Fining agent that helps clear the wine by drawing suspended particles out of it.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast at the right temperature. If the liquid is too hot, it can kill the yeast before fermentation starts. Cooling it to about the temperature of new milk lets the yeast survive and begin working steadily.

“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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