Skip to main content
Dessert

Wine Posset

A dessert made by boiling milk and bread crumb, adding nutmeg, sugar, and wine, served with toast and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Wine Posset

Ingredients

Directions

Make the posset

  1. Boil the milk and bread crumb until soft.

  2. Remove from heat and stir in grated nutmeg and sugar.

  3. Pour in the Lisbon wine slowly to prevent curdling.

Serve

  1. Serve in a china bowl with toast and butter on the side.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

New milk
Forms the creamy base that the wine is poured into and gently thickened.
Crumb of a penny loaf
Soaks up milk as it boils, softening and helping to thicken the posset.
Lisbon wine
Adds acidity and flavour, and its acid can curdle the milk if poured in quickly.

The step that matters

Pouring in the Lisbon wine. Wine is acidic, so adding it quickly to hot milk can make the milk curdle. Pouring slowly and gradually keeps the mixture smooth.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

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

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes