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Hypocras

Hypocras is a spiced wine made with white wine, sugar, cinnamon, marjoram, long pepper, musk, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Marjoram and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 957 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Hypocras

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine white wine, loaf sugar, cinnamon, sweet marjoram, and long pepper in a mortar and beat until grossly mixed.

  2. Strain the mixture through a filtering bag, adding the grain of musk.

  3. Add the juice of the lemon and gently heat the mixture over the fire.

  4. Pour the liquid over the spices again and let it sit for 3-4 days.

  5. Strain through a filtering bag again and bottle for use.

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. Marjoram + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together957 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Marjoram + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + marjoramtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together93 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

White wine
Forms the liquid base that carries the sugar and spice flavours.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the wine and lemon.
Cinnamon
Contributes warm aroma and flavour to the wine.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the wine.

The step that matters

Gently heating the mixture after adding lemon juice. Heating only gently keeps the wine from boiling, which would drive off alcohol and volatile aroma compounds from the spices and citrus.

Swap the cinnamon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, sugar, marjoram, pepper, lemon):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Cinnamonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, sugar, marjoram, pepper, lemon. 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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