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Drink

How to Make Caudle

Caudle is a hot ale-based drink spiced with ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, sweetened with honey or brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

How to Make Caudle

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caudle

  1. Mix the groats with the cold ale.

  2. Stir this mixture into a saucepan with the hot ale.

  3. Add the bruised ginger, cinnamon, and cloves.

  4. Stir the caudle over the fire and let it boil gently for 10 minutes.

  5. Strain the caudle into a jug, removing the spices.

Finish and serve

  1. Sweeten with honey or brown sugar, and add spirits or wine to taste.

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + honeytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  5. Honey + spirittop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together79 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Groats
Thicken the drink and give it a soft, porridge-like body as they cook.
Ale
Forms the liquid base and carries the flavour of the drink.
Honey or brown sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the spices and the ale.

The step that matters

Let the caudle boil gently for 10 minutes. Groats must cook long enough to soften and thicken the liquid fully. A hard boil can scorch the bottom of the pan and break up the grains, so gentle heat keeps the texture smooth.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ginger, cinnamon, honey, spirit):

  1. Clovethe original
  2. Cardamomfits about as well
  3. Nutmegfits less well
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, cinnamon, honey, spirit. 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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