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Drink

White-Wine Whey

A whey drink made by boiling milk, adding sugar, wine, and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

White-Wine Whey

Ingredients

Directions

Heat the milk

  1. Pour ½ pint of milk into a saucepan and add 4 lumps of sugar.

  2. Place the saucepan on the heat and bring to a boil.

Curdle and strain

  1. Once boiling, add ⅓ cup of wine.

  2. Move the saucepan to the side of the heat and let it sit for about 1 minute.

  3. Strain the whey into a glass.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: sotolon (fenugreek, curry).

  3. Sugar + winetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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
Provides the proteins that curdle, separating into solid curds and liquid whey.
Wine
Its acidity makes the milk proteins clump together, so the curds separate from the whey.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the whey.

The step that matters

Adding the wine to the boiling milk. The wine's acid must be stirred in while the milk is boiling so the proteins curdle and separate cleanly. Adding it too early, or too much, can leave the curds small or tough and the whey cloudy.

“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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