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Irish, or Two Milk Whey

A liquid whey produced by heating buttermilk and sweet milk together.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Buttermilk and milk work together. They rank in the top 41% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Irish, or Two Milk Whey

Ingredients

Directions

Curdle the milk

  1. Combine the sweet milk and buttermilk in a saucepan.

  2. Heat the mixture until it is boiling hot.

  3. Gently stir the buttermilk around the edges of the pan.

  4. Allow it to come to a boil, then remove from heat.

Strain the whey

  1. Let it settle, then strain off the whey.

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 + milktop 41% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9 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

Fresh buttermilk
Its acidity causes the milk proteins to clump into curds when heated.
Sweet milk
Supplies the milk proteins that separate into soft curds, leaving the whey behind.

The step that matters

Heat gently and stir only the edges. Heat and acid make the milk proteins clump into curds. Bringing it only to a boil and stirring gently keeps those curds forming in soft, intact pieces, while vigorous stirring can break them up and cloud the whey.

“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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