Skip to main content
Drink

Raisins or Passover Wine

A sweet wine made by steeping raisins in water with sugar, cinnamon, lemon peel, and cloves, then bottling and aging.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Raisins or Passover Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wine

  1. Place chopped raisins in a jug with sugar and cold water.

  2. Cover the vessel and set it on or behind the stove hearth.

  3. After 3 to 4 days, skim the mixture.

  4. Filter the skimmed mixture through a funnel lined with linen or blotting paper into bottles.

  5. Add a stick of cinnamon, some lemon peel, and cloves to each bottle.

  6. Cork the bottles well.

Age

  1. Store the bottles in a cellar for at least two weeks.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Raisin + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  5. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Fine raisins
Provide the sugars and fruit flavour that ferment into the wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbonation.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, sweet aroma to the finished wine.
Cloves
Adds spiced aroma to the finished wine.

The step that matters

Skim the mixture after 3 to 4 days. Skimming removes the foam and solids that rise during early fermentation, so they do not spoil the flavour or cloud the wine when it is filtered.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, sugar, cinnamon, clove. 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.

More raisin wine recipes

Malaga 6Cake 5Orange 3 See all 122 →

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesCinnamon TinctureCinnamon Tincture10 recipes