Name: Wine Whey
Ingredients: 2 cups milk; ⅓ cup sherry or port wine; ⅓ cup warm water

Why it works: Milk and sherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,479 recipes. Both carry 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine, which smells cocoa, roasted. The science ↓

Wine Whey

Ingredients

2 cups milk
⅓ cup sherry or port wine
⅓ cup warm water

Directions

Make the whey

Boil the milk in a saucepan.
Add the sherry or port wine and strain the mixture.
Stir in the warm water.

Serve

Serve one meal of this once or twice a day.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Milk + sherrytop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,479 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk: Provides the proteins that separate into curds and liquid whey when heated with wine.
Sherry or port wine: Its acidity makes the hot milk curdle, so the liquid can be strained off.

“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.