Name: Green Gooseberry Wine
Ingredients: 3½ quarts unripe green gooseberries; 32 quarts cold water; 34 lbs lump sugar; 1 bottle best gin

Why it works: Sugar and gin work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 344 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Green Gooseberry Wine

Ingredients

3½ quarts unripe green gooseberries
32 quarts cold water
34 lbs lump sugar
1 bottle best gin

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Bruise the gooseberries well.
Add cold water and let stand for 24 hours.
Drain the gooseberries through a sieve.

Add sugar and gin

Add 34 lbs of lump sugar for every gallon of liquor.
Put the mixture into a cask with a bottle of gin.

Age and bottle

Let it stand for 6 months, then bottle it.

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.

Sugar + gintop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together344 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Gooseberries: Supply the fruit flavour and natural acidity that give the wine its character.
Lump sugar: Provides sweetness and the sugar that yeast converts into alcohol during fermentation.
Gin: Adds alcohol, which helps preserve the finished wine.

“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.