Name: Caudle for the Sick and Lying-in
Ingredients: 3 quarts water; 1 pint cold water; oatmeal (enough to thicken); 20 Jamaica peppers (finely powdered); ½ cup sugar; ½ pint well-fermented table beer; 1 glass gin

Why it works: Pepper and beer work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 940 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Caudle for the Sick and Lying-in

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Bring 3 quarts of water to a boil.
Mix enough oatmeal with 1 pint of cold water to create a smooth paste.

Make the caudle

Once the water is boiling, stir in the oatmeal mixture and the powdered Jamaica peppers.
Boil until the mixture reaches a medium thickness.
Add sugar, table beer, and gin, and stir well.

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.

Pepper + beertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together940 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Sugar + gintop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together344 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Beer + gintop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together22 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Sugar + beertop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together699 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Pepper + sugartop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,401 recipes

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

Pepper and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 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

Oatmeal: Thickens the liquid into a smooth, gruel-like body as it cooks.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the bitter spice and the alcohol.
Table beer: Adds a mildly sour, yeasty flavour and some liquid to the caudle.
Gin: Adds alcohol and aromatic botanical flavour to the finished drink.

“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.