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Drink

The Dinner Hour

A fermented sweet beverage made from sugar, water, yeast, raisins, and cream of tartar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

The Dinner Hour

Ingredients

Directions

Ferment

  1. Combine 1¼ pounds of sugar with 1 gallon of water in a large container.

  2. Add ¼ pint of good yeast to the mixture.

  3. Maintain the mixture at a temperature of 75°F to 80°F for 2 to 3 days.

Finish and bottle

  1. Rack off the liquid from the sediment into a ripening cask.

  2. Mix in 1 ounce of cream of tartar and 1 ounce of crushed raisins.

  3. Once the sweet taste is gone, bottle the liquid and cork it tightly.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  3. Cream + raisintop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,642 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Feeds the yeast and provides the sweetness that fermentation gradually uses up.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, producing the wine.
Cream of tartar
Adds mild acidity to the liquid, giving it a tart edge.
Raisins
Add fruity flavour and a little extra fermentable sugar.

The step that matters

Bottle only once the sweet taste is gone. Yeast consumes sugar slowly, so any sugar left when the wine is bottled can keep fermenting. In a tightly corked bottle, the carbon dioxide produced can build pressure and may burst the bottle or force the cork out.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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