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Gooseberrt Wine

A fermented beverage made from water, gooseberries, sugar, honey, tartar, citrus peels, and light brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Gooseberrt Wine

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine 4½ gallons of water and 5 gallons of gooseberries in a large container.

  2. Mix in 6 pounds of sugar, 4 pounds of honey, 1 ounce of white tartar, 1 ounce of dry orange peel, and 1 ounce of dry lemon peel.

  3. Add ½ gallon of light brandy to the mixture. Stir well and allow to ferment for six months.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Honey + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,068 recipes

    Shared aroma: pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Orange + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,706 recipes

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

  4. Honey + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together169 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (sweet).

  5. Honey + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,707 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Gooseberries
Provide the fruit base and flavour for the wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Honey
Adds sugar for fermentation and a rounded, floral sweetness.
White tartar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the wine stable.
Light brandy
Raises the alcohol content, helping preserve the wine and add body.

The step that matters

Stir well before fermenting. Thorough stirring dissolves the sugar and honey evenly through the fruit and water, so the yeast can ferment the whole batch consistently rather than in pockets of concentrated sugar.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, honey, orange, 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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