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
Directions
Prepare the liquid
Bruise the gooseberries well and add them to the cold water.
Let the mixture stand for 24 hours.
Drain the gooseberries through a sieve to collect the liquid.
Make and age the wine
Add 34 lbs of lump sugar to every gallon of the liquid.
Transfer the mixture into a cask and add the bottle of gin.
Let it stand for 6 months before bottling.
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.
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Sugar + gintop 19% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Gooseberries
- Provide the fruit flavour and acidity that give the wine its character.
- Lump sugar
- Adds sweetness and feeds fermentation, which produces alcohol.
- Gin
- Adds extra alcohol, which helps preserve the wine and adds aroma.
The step that matters
Bruising the gooseberries well. Breaking the skins exposes the fruit's juice and flavour to the water, so the liquid extracts more of the gooseberry character during the 24-hour stand.
“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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