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To Make Elder Wine to Drink Cold

A fermented beverage made from raisins, sugar, water, elderberry juice, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and sugar 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 ↓

To Make Elder Wine to Drink Cold

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Chop the raisins small and boil the sugar in water.

  2. Pour the hot sugar water over the raisins and stir daily for a week.

  3. Strain the mixture and press out the raisins.

  4. Add the elder berry juice to the strained liquid.

  5. Let it ferment for 2-3 days with yeast on top, then transfer to a barrel.

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. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Raisins
Provide sugar, flavour and body to the wine as they break down in the liquid.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast so it can ferment the liquid into alcohol.
Yeast
Converts the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Elder berry juice
Adds fruity aroma and flavour to the finished wine.

The step that matters

Stir daily while the raisins steep. Stirring keeps the raisin pulp and sugar water mixed and exposed to air, which helps the mixture break down evenly and encourages a healthy start to fermentation.

“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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