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Drink

Substitute for White Wine-whey

A beverage made by boiling milk, adding sherbet, then mixing with boiling water and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Substitute for White Wine-whey

Ingredients

Directions

Curdle the milk

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until it boils.

  2. Pour in the sherbet and let it boil briefly.

  3. Remove from heat and let the curd settle without stirring.

Finish and strain

  1. Once clear, add the boiling water and let it sit longer.

  2. Strain through a fine sieve or muslin before serving.

  3. Add sugar if desired.

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

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

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
Provides the proteins that clump into curd when acid is added.
Sherbet
Acidic ingredient that makes the milk curdle and separate into curd and clear liquid.

The step that matters

Let the curd settle without stirring. Stirring breaks up the forming curds, so they stay cloudy and do not separate cleanly. Leaving the mixture still lets the curds gather and sink, leaving a clearer liquid to strain off.

“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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