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Wine Gruel of Port or Sherry

A gruel made by boiling port or sherry with water, thickening with potato flour or tapioca, sweetened with sugar, and optionally flavored with preserved fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sherry and pineapple work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 228 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Wine Gruel of Port or Sherry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gruel

  1. Bring equal parts of port or sherry and water to a boil.

  2. Thicken with potato flour or tapioca.

  3. Stir in sugar and salt.

  4. Add preserved fruit or pineapple if desired.

Finish and serve

  1. If using, beat egg whites with a little salt until stiff and mix in before serving.

  2. Serve plain or with Zwieback or wafers.

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. Sherry + pineappletop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together228 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Potato + pineappletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together124 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methyl-1-butanol (fusel, malty).

  3. Sherry + potatotop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together184 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + pineappletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Potato flour or instantaneous tapioca
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, gel-like gruel as it heats.
Port or sherry
Provides the main flavour and a little acidity to the liquid base.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the wine's tartness.
Whites of several eggs
Whipped to stiffness, they add airy lightness when folded in.

The step that matters

Thicken with potato flour or tapioca. Starch must be dispersed in the liquid and brought to a boil to swell and thicken properly. Adding it to cold or unevenly mixed liquid can leave lumps or a thin, grainy texture.

Swap the pineapple

The recipe marks pineapple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sherry, potato, sugar, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Pineapplethe original
  4. Plumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sherry, potato, sugar, egg. 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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