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Dessert

Wine Posset

A sweet, creamy dessert made by boiling bread crumbs in milk, then adding wine and sugar.

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 and 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the bread softens into, giving the posset its body.
Penny loaf crumb
Soaks up the hot milk and thickens it, giving the posset a soft, pudding-like texture.
Lisbon wine
Adds acidity and flavour, and its acid thickens the milk curds slightly when mixed in.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic spice to the finished posset.

The step that matters

Gradually mixing in the wine. Adding wine too quickly to warm milk can cause it to curdle in lumps. Pouring it in slowly while stirring keeps the mixture smooth and evenly combined.

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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