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Dandelion Wine

A fermented beverage made from dandelion flowers, water, sugar, lemon juice, and whiskey.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Dandelion and lemon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 57 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Dandelion Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the infusion

  1. Place 5 quarts of dandelion flowers in a large container.

  2. Pour 2 gallons of boiling water over the flowers and let them steep overnight.

  3. In the morning, strain the mixture.

Make the wine

  1. Add 4 pounds of white sugar and the juice of 6 lemons to the strained liquid.

  2. Boil the mixture for 1 hour.

  3. Strain the mixture into a stone jar.

  4. Let the wine sit for 2 to 3 weeks.

  5. Add ½ pint of whiskey to the wine.

  6. Strain the wine into bottles.

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. Dandelion + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Dandelion + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together80 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Dandelion flowers
Provide the flavour and colour that define the wine.
White sugar
Sweetens the wine and feeds fermentation to build alcohol.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.
Whiskey
Raises the alcohol content and helps preserve the wine.

The step that matters

Adding the whiskey after the long rest. Whiskey is added only after the wine has sat and fermented, so its alcohol does not interrupt the fermentation. Adding it at the wrong point can change the balance of the finished wine.

“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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