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Receipt for Porter

A dark beer brewed with malt, hops, treacle, licorice root, spices, and flavorings.

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

Receipt for Porter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine the malt and hops in a large brewing vessel.

  2. Add the treacle, liquorice root, essentia bina, and colour.

  3. Stir in the capsicum, Spanish liquorice, Coccuiua Indicus, and salt of tartar.

  4. Mix in the ginger, lime, linseed, and cinnamon.

Ferment

  1. Allow the mixture to ferment according to your brewing method.

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 the base colour and body of the beer.
Hops
Adds bitterness that balances the sweetness of the malt and treacle.
Treacle
Adds dark sweetness and deep colour, and feeds the fermentation.

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.

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