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White Wine Whey

A hot whey beverage flavored with white wine and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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White Wine Whey

Why it works: Milk and sherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,479 recipes. Both carry 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine, which smells cocoa, roasted. The science ↓

White Wine Whey

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the curd

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

  2. Add the white wine mixed with a little dissolved sugar.

  3. Boil for a few minutes until a light curd forms.

Separate and serve

  1. Strain through a fine sieve to separate the whey from the curd.

  2. Serve the whey hot and discard the curd.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,479 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

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

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

  3. Sherry + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,141 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 the light curd when acid is added.
Sherry
Its acidity makes the milk proteins curdle, separating curd from liquid whey.

The step that matters

Adding the wine to the boiling milk. The acid in the wine must be added while the milk is hot so its proteins coagulate into curds. Adding it too slowly or to cooler milk can leave the curd weak and the whey cloudy, so the separation may not be clean.

“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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