Skip to main content
Drink

Wine Whey for Invalids

A beverage made by boiling milk, adding cherry wine, and straining the whey.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and cherry work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 851 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Wine Whey for Invalids

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Sweeten the milk to taste.

  2. Place the milk in a double boiler and bring to a boil.

  3. Add the cherry wine when the milk boils.

  4. When the curd forms, strain the whey through a clean muslin bag into small glasses.

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. Milk + cherrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together851 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Cherry + winetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together423 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  4. Milk + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (fenugreek, curry).

  5. Cherry + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,598 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Milk
Its proteins form the curd that separates from the liquid whey once the wine is added.
Cherry wine
Its acidity curdles the heated milk, separating curds from the clear whey.

The step that matters

Adding the cherry wine when the milk boils. Acid causes milk proteins to coagulate into curds. Adding wine to milk that is already at a boil makes the separation happen quickly, so the curds form clearly and the whey can be strained off cleanly.

Swap the cherry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, wine, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, wine, 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.

More wine whey recipes

White 44 See all 118 →

You might also like

Raisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipesElderberry WineElderberry Wine51 recipesRhubarb WineRhubarb Wine51 recipes