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Drink

To Mull Wine

A warm wine drink sweetened with sugar, spiced with nutmeg, enriched with egg yolks, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Mull Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the wine

  1. Grate half a nutmeg into a pint of wine.

  2. Sweeten the wine to taste with loaf sugar.

  3. Heat the wine over the fire until it boils, then remove it to cool.

Thicken and serve

  1. Beat the yolks of four eggs and mix in a little cold wine.

  2. Carefully combine the egg mixture with the hot wine, a little at a time, to prevent curdling.

  3. Pour the mixture back and forth until it looks fine and bright.

  4. Return it to the fire until it is hot and thick.

  5. Pour it back and forth several times and serve with toasted bread slices.

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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Nutmeg + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Nutmeg + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Nutmeg + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

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

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

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

Nutmeg and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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 that carries the spices and sugar.
Egg yolks
Thicken the warm wine into a smooth, creamy body as they set with gentle heat.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the wine to the cook's taste.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the wine.

The step that matters

Combining the egg mixture with the hot wine. Adding the egg yolks to hot wine too quickly can scramble them into curds. Adding the hot wine to the eggs a little at a time, while stirring, gently warms the yolks so they blend smoothly.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Tarragonfits less well
  4. Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, sugar, egg, bread. 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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