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Drink

Pink Champagne

A sweet wine made from currants, sugar, water, yeast, and isinglass, then bottled with added sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and white currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Pink Champagne

Ingredients

Directions

Make the must

  1. Boil the sugar in water for 30 minutes, skimming well.

  2. Pour the hot liquid over the currants, which should be picked but not bruised.

  3. Add the yeast when the mixture is nearly cold.

  4. Let it work for 2 days.

Clarify and cask

  1. Strain the mixture through a horse-hair sieve.

  2. Transfer the strained liquid to a small cask with isinglass.

  3. Keep extra liquor to fill the cask as it works over.

  4. Bung the cask up.

  5. Let it stand until April.

Bottle and store

  1. Add a lump of double-refined sugar to each bottle before bottling.

  2. Let the bottles remain uncorked for 1 day.

  3. Cork and wire the bottles.

  4. Store the bottles upright in the cellar, laying a few on their sides for about a week before serving.

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. Red currant + white curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + red curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. 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

Lump sugar
Feeds the yeast, which turns it into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Red currants
Provide the pink colour and tart fruit flavour.
White currants
Add fruit flavour and acidity to the juice.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, giving the drink its fizz.
Isinglass
Fines the liquid, helping it clear by drawing suspended particles down.

The step that matters

Add the yeast when the mixture is nearly cold. Yeast cells are killed by high heat, so adding it to hot liquid can stop fermentation before it starts. Waiting until the mixture has cooled keeps the yeast alive to ferment the sugar.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, red currant. 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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