Skip to main content
Drink

Wine, to Mull

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

  1. Simmer the water with the spices in a saucepan until the flavor is extracted.

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

  3. Serve the mulled wine separately with strips of crisp dry 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 base liquid and carries the warm, spiced flavor of the drink.
Spices
Infused into the simmering water to give the drink its aroma and warm flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the wine.

The step that matters

Bringing the mixture to heat without boiling. Boiling wine drives off alcohol and can dull its aroma and make the flavor harsh, so the mixture should be heated only until it is hot.

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.

You might also like

Wine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipesElderberry WineElderberry Wine51 recipes