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Ginger Wine

A fermented ginger wine made with tinctures, sugar, water, ginger, lemon peel, yeast, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Ginger Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the flavouring

  1. Mix the tincture of ginger, tincture of cayenne, tartaric acid, caramel, and enough water to make 4 pints.

  2. Combine this mixture with 4 pounds of sugar dissolved in 5 quarts of water.

Make and ferment the wine

  1. In a separate pot, boil the bruised Jamaica ginger with 7 gallons of water and 20 pounds of refined sugar for 30 minutes.

  2. Allow the mixture to cool until lukewarm, then add the lemon peel and yeast.

  3. Set aside to ferment for two weeks, then strain and add 2 pints of brandy.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

  4. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  5. Ginger + brandytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, giving the wine its alcohol content.
Refined sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast converts during fermentation, and sweetness in the finished wine.
Jamaica ginger
Supplies the main ginger flavour and aroma, extracted by boiling.
Brandy
Raises the alcohol content and helps preserve the finished wine.
Tartaric acid
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and helps keep the wine stable.

The step that matters

Cooling before adding yeast. If the boiled liquid is still hot, it can kill the yeast before fermentation starts. Cooling it until lukewarm keeps the yeast alive so it can convert the sugar.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Apricotfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, sugar, brandy. 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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