Skip to main content
Drink

Recipe for Porter

A recipe for a porter beer made with malt, hops, treacle, and various spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ginger and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Recipe for Porter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine 1 quart of malt with 8 lbs of hops in a brewing vessel.

  2. Add 9 lbs of treacle and 8 lbs of liquorice root.

  3. In a separate pot, prepare 8 lbs of essentia bina by boiling moist sugar in an iron vessel until it reaches a thick, black syrupy consistency.

  4. Mix the essentia bina into the brewing mixture.

Add flavourings

  1. Add 8 lbs of color, ½ oz of capsicum, 2 oz of Spanish liquorice, ⅛ oz of cocculus indicus, and 2 drachms of salt of tartar.

  2. Finally, incorporate 3 oz of ginger, 4 oz of lime, 1 oz of linseed, and 2 drachms of cinnamon.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Allow the mixture to ferment 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.

  1. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,621 recipes

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

  3. Capsicum + limetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,969 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lime + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together470 recipes

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

  5. Capsicum + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

What each ingredient does

Malt
Provides fermentable sugars and body to the brew.
Hops
Adds bitterness that balances the sweetness of the malt and sugars.
Treacle
Adds dark colour, sweetness and rich flavour.
Essentia bina
Adds dark colour and a thick, syrupy body from caramelised sugar.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (malt, hops, capsicum, ginger, cinnamon):

  1. Mangofits about as well
  2. Limethe original
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Applefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against malt, hops, capsicum, ginger, cinnamon. 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 porter recipes

Cup 5Sangaree 3Soda 3 See all 8 →

You might also like

Ginger PopGinger Pop22 recipesGinger WineGinger Wine12 recipesGinger BeerGinger Beer11 recipesCinnamon TinctureCinnamon Tincture10 recipes