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Wine, White Currant

A fermented beverage made from white currants, sugar, water, yeast, and isinglass, sweetened with refined sugar.

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 must

  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 white currants, picked from the stalks but not bruised.

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

Ferment and clarify

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

  2. 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 currants
Provide the fruit flavour and acidity that give the wine its character.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast to produce alcohol and adds sweetness to the finished wine.
Good ale yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Isinglass
Fines the wine, helping suspended particles settle so it clears.

The step that matters

Cooling the syrup before adding yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the must must cool to about lukewarm, like new milk, before the yeast is added. Adding it too hot can stop fermentation before it starts.

“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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