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Drink

British Port

A fortified wine made by blending port, cider, brandy, elderberry and sloe juices, colored with cochineal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Port wine and cider share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41 recipes. Both carry ethyl pentanoate, which smells yeast, fruit. The science ↓

British Port

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Put 8 gallons of genuine port wine into a clean 60‑gallon cask.

  2. Fume the cask well with a match.

  3. Add 40 gallons of good cider.

  4. Fill the cask with French brandy.

  5. Add the juice of elderberries and sloes for roughness.

  6. Add cochineal to achieve the desired color.

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. Port wine + cidertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together41 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

  2. Cider + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  3. Port wine + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together127 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Port wine
Provides the base sweetness and fortified wine character of the blend.
Cider
Adds bulk and fruity body, diluting the port into a larger volume.
French brandy
Raises the alcohol content and adds spirit warmth to the blend.
Elderberry and sloe juice
Contributes tannin-like astringency and fruit flavour, giving the roughness the recipe calls for.
Cochineal
Supplies a red colour so the blend matches the desired appearance.

“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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