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Damson Wine

A fermented wine made from damsons, sugar, ginger, and lemon, aged in bottles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Damson Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Steep the fruit

  1. Soak damsons in cold water for a week, stirring daily.

  2. Strain the mixture and pour the juice into a jar.

Add sugar and let stand

  1. Add sugar, sliced ginger, and sliced lemons to the jar.

  2. Let it stand for another week.

Bottle and finish

  1. Strain again and bottle.

  2. Leave the bottles uncorked for a week.

  3. Add a pinch of isinglass, cork the bottles, and tie the corks.

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. Sugar + gingertop 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).

Sugar and ginger 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

Damsons
Provide the main fruit flavour, colour and body of the wine.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and feeds the fermentation that produces alcohol.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Root ginger
Adds a warm, spicy aroma to the finished wine.

The step that matters

Leave the bottles uncorked for a week. Fermentation is still active and releases carbon dioxide gas. Leaving the bottles uncorked lets this gas escape, so corking too early can build pressure in the bottles.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Orangefits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Vanillafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger. 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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