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Drink

Treacle Whey

A sweetened whey beverage made by adding treacle to boiling buttermilk and optionally rosemary.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Buttermilk and rosemary work together. They rank in the top 28% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Treacle Whey

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Add a large spoonful of treacle to a pint of boiling buttermilk.

  2. If desired, add a sprig of rosemary.

  3. Allow the mixture to curdle sufficiently, then strain it from the curd.

  4. If the whey is too sweet, dilute it with water.

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. Buttermilk + rosemarytop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together29 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Buttermilk
Its acidity and milk proteins curdle when hot, separating curd from the liquid whey.
Treacle
Adds sweetness and a deep, molasses-like flavour to the whey.

The step that matters

Allow the mixture to curdle sufficiently. Heat and acid make the milk proteins clump into curds. If it is not left long enough, the curds stay loose and the whey comes out cloudy and weakly separated.

“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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