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Drink

Mulled Wine

Mulled wine is a warm beverage made by boiling wine with nutmeg, cloves, and sugar, 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: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Mulled Wine

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the wine with nutmeg, cloves, and sugar.

  2. Serve it with slices of toasted bread.

  3. Beat the yolks of four eggs with a little cold wine.

  4. Mix the egg mixture with the hot wine, pouring it back and forth until smooth.

  5. Heat the mixture again until it thickens.

  6. Serve with toasted bread.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Wine + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,958 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-isoeugenol (clove, spicy).

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

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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 and carries the spices and sweetness.
Egg yolks
Thicken the warm wine as their proteins set, giving a creamy body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the wine's acidity and spice.
Nutmeg
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavor to the wine.
Cloves
Contributes pungent, aromatic spice flavor to the wine.

The step that matters

Heating the egg mixture until it thickens. Egg yolk proteins set when heated, so the mixture thickens gently. If it gets too hot or heats too fast, the proteins can scramble and curdle, leaving a grainy texture. Pouring the hot wine in slowly while whisking helps prevent this.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Clovethe original
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, nutmeg, sugar, bread, 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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