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Drink

White Elder Wine

A fermented beverage made from elder flowers, raisins, sugar, water, lemon juice, egg whites, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,481 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

White Elder Wine

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil 6 gallons of water with 18 pounds of white powdered sugar.

  2. Skim the mixture and add 2 well-beaten egg whites.

  3. When the mixture is near cold, stir in 6 tablespoons of lemon juice and 4 to 5 tablespoons of yeast.

  4. Stir the mixture every day.

  5. Add 6 pounds of stoned raisins into the cask and pour in the wine.

  6. Stop the cask tightly and bottle the wine in 6 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. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + raisintop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

White powdered sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol, and sweetness in the finished wine.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, driving the fermentation.
Stoned raisins
Add fermentable sugar and body to the wine.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and supports a clean fermentation.
Elder flowers
Provide the characteristic floral aroma of the wine.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before adding the yeast. Yeast is killed by very hot liquid, so the boiled sugar solution must be near cold before the yeast and lemon juice go in. Adding them too early can stop fermentation before it starts.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Datesfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, raisin. 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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