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Wine-whey

A sweet milk beverage flavored with sherry wine, sugar, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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

Directions

  1. Heat the sweet milk in a saucepan until it begins to boil.

  2. Slowly pour in the sherry wine mixed with sugar.

  3. Grate a little nutmeg into the mixture.

  4. Once it boils again, remove it from the heat.

  5. Let it cool, then strain for use.

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 + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,479 recipes

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

  2. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Sherry + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,246 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: sotolon (fenugreek, curry).

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

Sweet milk
Forms the base liquid that the wine curdles and separates into whey.
Sherry wine
Its acidity curdles the hot milk, separating curds from the clear whey.
Sugar
Sweetens the wine so the finished whey tastes mellow rather than sharp.

The step that matters

Slowly pour in the sherry wine mixed with sugar.. Adding the wine slowly to hot milk lets the acid curdle the milk gradually, giving clean curds and clear whey instead of a grainy, muddy result.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Clovefits about as well
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Thymefits about as well

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

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