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Dessert

To Make a Sack Posset

A chilled dessert made by mixing Naples biscuits with cream, cinnamon, sherry, lemon, and sugar, served with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Make a Sack Posset

Ingredients

Directions

Make the posset

  1. Grate the Naples biscuits into a pint of thin cream.

  2. Add the stick of cinnamon and heat over low fire.

  3. Boil until it thickens properly.

  4. Stir in ½ pint of sack and a slice of lemon.

  5. Add sugar to taste and stir gently without boiling.

Serve

  1. Serve with dry toast.

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

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

  2. Biscuit + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together312 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Biscuit + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together697 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Naples biscuits
Crumbs thicken the cream and add a toasted, sweet flavour.
Thin cream
Forms the body of the posset and gives it a rich, smooth texture.
Sack (sherry)
Adds acidity and fortified wine flavour that balances the richness of the cream.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma that brightens the sweet, creamy base.

The step that matters

Stir in the sack and lemon, then stir gently without boiling. Once the cream has thickened, boiling again can cause it to separate or turn grainy. Adding acidic sack and lemon and stirring gently keeps the mixture smooth and set.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (biscuit, cream, cinnamon, sherry, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, cream, cinnamon, sherry, sugar. 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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