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Dessert

Wine Posset

A creamy dessert made by boiling milk with bread crumbs, nutmeg, sugar, and wine, served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Wine Posset

Ingredients

Directions

Make the posset

  1. Boil the crumb of a penny loaf in 1 quart of milk until soft.

  2. Remove from heat and grate in ½ nutmeg.

  3. Add sugar to taste.

  4. Pour into a china bowl.

  5. Gradually mix in 1 pint of Lisbon wine.

Serve

  1. Serve with toasted bread on a plate.

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 + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Nutmeg + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  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

Penny loaf crumb
Soaks up milk and thickens the drink as it softens in the boiling milk.
Milk
Forms the creamy base that the bread crumb thickens and softens in.
Lisbon wine
Adds acidity and body, and curdles the milk slightly when mixed in.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the milk and wine.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the wine.

The step that matters

Gradually mix in 1 pint of Lisbon wine.. Adding wine slowly to hot milk helps it curdle gently into soft flakes rather than separating into harsh, grainy clumps. Pouring steadily while stirring spreads the acid evenly through the milk.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Clovefits less well
  4. Gingerfits less well

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