Skip to main content
Drink

Wassail

A traditional festive drink made with beer, cider, sugar, cloves, roasted apples, lemon, and decorative flowers or holly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cider and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,238 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Wassail

Ingredients

Directions

Make the hot drink

  1. In a large enamelled or preserving pan, combine the beer, cider, sugar, and cloves.

  2. Stir until the sugar dissolves and the mixture is hot.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place the roasted apples in the bottom of a wassail bowl.

  2. Dust the spices over the apples.

  3. Pour the hot mixture over the apples.

  4. Float the rings of lemon on top.

  5. Decorate the bowl with flowers or a holly wreath.

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. Cider + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,238 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Clove + appletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Beer + appletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together59 recipes

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

  5. Beer + cidertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Beer
Provides the bitter, malty base that gives the drink its body.
Cider
Adds apple flavour and acidity, balancing the sweetness of the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the drink and rounds out the sharpness of the cider and spices.
Cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavour to the hot drink.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beer, cider, sugar, clove, apple):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Quincefits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beer, cider, sugar, clove, apple. 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.

More wassail recipes

Bowl 4 See all 3 →

You might also like

Apple WaterApple Water81 recipesSpruce BeerSpruce Beer58 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipes