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Dessert

White Wine Whey, or Treacle Posset

A sweet posset made with milk, sugar, and either white wine or treacle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and white wine work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 929 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

White Wine Whey, or Treacle Posset

Ingredients

Directions

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

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

  3. Once boiling, add ⅓ cup of white wine or treacle.

  4. Move the saucepan off the heat and let it sit for about 1 minute.

  5. Strain the whey into a glass and serve immediately.

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 + white winetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together929 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

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

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

  3. Sugar + white winetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,586 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
Forms the base that curdles and separates into curds and whey when acid is added.
White wine or treacle
Its acidity or flavour causes the hot milk to curdle, and treacle adds dark sweetness.

The step that matters

Adding the wine or treacle to the boiling milk. Acid or treacle must be added once the milk is boiling so it curdles cleanly into curds and whey. Adding it too early or stirring too hard can leave a grainy, broken texture.

“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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