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Wassail-bowl, Ok Cup

A sweet alcoholic beverage made with Lisbon sugar, beer, sherry, nutmeg, ginger, roasted bread, and optional lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Wassail-bowl, Ok Cup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the wassail

  1. Combine Lisbon sugar and warm beer in a bowl.

  2. Grate nutmeg and ginger into the mixture.

  3. Add sherry and the additional beer, then stir well.

  4. Sweeten to taste and cover.

  5. Let it stand for 2-3 hours.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the roasted bread slices before serving.

  2. Add lemon slices.

  3. Add sugar rubbed on lemon peel.

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 + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Beer + sherrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Beer + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together210 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Lisbon sugar
Provides sweetness and helps balance the sherry and beer.
Beer
Adds bitterness, body and a malty base to the punch.
Sherry
Adds fortified wine depth, acidity and warmth to the bowl.
Bread
Roasted brown slices soak up liquid and add a toasted, nutty flavour.
Nutmeg
Contributes warm, aromatic spice notes to the drink.

The step that matters

Let it stand for 2-3 hours. Resting lets the spices, sugar and sherry blend into the beer, so the flavour integrates instead of tasting harsh or separate.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, beer, nutmeg, ginger, sherry, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, beer, nutmeg, ginger, sherry, bread. 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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