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Wine, to Mull

A warm alcoholic beverage made by simmering wine with water, sugar, spices, and served with toast or biscuits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and biscuit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 121 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Wine, to Mull

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mulled wine

  1. In a saucepan, boil the spices in water until the flavor is extracted.

  2. Add the wine and sugar, and bring to the boiling point without allowing it to boil over.

Serve

  1. Serve the mulled wine separately with strips of toast or biscuits.

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. Clove + biscuittop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together121 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Wine + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-isoeugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. Sugar + biscuittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Wine + biscuittop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together268 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Sugar and clove barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 17,182 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Wine
Forms the liquid base and carries the flavor of the spices.
Spices
Infuse into the liquid to give the drink its warm, aromatic flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the wine and spices.

The step that matters

Bringing the wine to the boil without letting it boil over. Once the wine reaches a rolling boil, alcohol evaporates quickly and the liquid can spill over. Heating just to the boiling point, while watching closely, keeps the flavor and avoids a mess.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wine, sugar, biscuit):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, sugar, biscuit. 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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