Skip to main content
Drink

Mulled Claret

A warm beverage made by simmering claret with water, cloves, mixed spice, and sugar.

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

Why it works: Sugar and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,182 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Mulled Claret

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the cloves and mixed spice in the water until the flavor is extracted.

  2. Add the sugar and claret, then bring to a boil.

  3. Heat the wine in a mull or lined saucepan.

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. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Claret
Forms the wine base, supplying most of the drink's body and flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the wine's natural acidity and tannin.
Cloves
Release aromatic oils into the liquid, giving a warm spiced flavor.
Mixed spice
Adds warm aromatic notes that blend with the cloves.

The step that matters

Adding the claret and bringing it to a boil. Wine boiled hard loses delicate aromas and drives off alcohol, which can leave the drink tasting flat or harsh. Keeping the heat controlled preserves the wine's flavor and the spice character you extracted earlier.

“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

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes