Name: Green Gooseberry Wine
Ingredients: 8 gallons green gooseberries; 8 gallons cold water; 3.5 pounds loaf sugar per gallon; 1 quart best gin

Why it works: Sugar and gin work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 344 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Green Gooseberry Wine

Ingredients

8 gallons green gooseberries
8 gallons cold water
3.5 pounds loaf sugar per gallon
1 quart best gin

Directions

Prepare the juice

Bruise the green gooseberries thoroughly.
Combine the bruised gooseberries with cold water and let them stand for 24 hours.
Drain the liquid through a sieve.

Make and age the wine

For each gallon of liquid, add 3.5 pounds of loaf sugar.
Pour the liquid into a cask and add 1 quart of gin.
Let it stand for 6 months before bottling.

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.

Sugar + gintop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together344 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Green gooseberries: Provide the tart fruit flavour and the juice that ferments into wine.
Loaf sugar: Feeds the fermentation and adds sweetness to balance the tartness.
Gin: Adds spirit strength and helps preserve the wine during aging.

“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.