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Soup

Wine Soup

A barley or sago soup flavored with cinnamon, lemon rind, raisins, and claret.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,390 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Wine Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil pearl barley or sago in water with cinnamon, lemon rind, and raisins or currants for two hours.

  2. Add sugar to taste.

  3. Stir in claret and allow to boil once.

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 + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  3. Barley + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together127 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Barley + raisintop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Pearl barley or sago
Swells during long simmering to thicken the soup and give it body.
Seedless raisins or currants
Soften as they cook, adding sweetness and a plump, chewy texture.
Claret
Adds wine flavour and acidity, giving the soup its characteristic tang.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the wine and rounds out the sweetness.

The step that matters

Stir in claret and allow to boil once. Boiling wine drives off some alcohol and sharpens its flavour. Boiling it too long, or too hard, can make the soup taste harsh and thin out its aroma, so bring it to a single boil and then stop.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (barley, cinnamon, raisin, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against barley, cinnamon, raisin, sugar. 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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