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White Wine Whey

A hot beverage made by boiling milk with sherry, optionally sweetened and flavored with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the whey

  1. Bring the new milk to a boil in an enamelled saucepan.

  2. Add the sherry and bring to a boil again.

  3. Strain through a muslin cloth.

Finish and serve

  1. If desired, sweeten to taste.

  2. Serve hot.

  3. Alternatively, add lemon juice instead of wine.

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 + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Sherry + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

New milk
Forms the base liquid that the curds separate from and the whey comes out of.
Sherry
Its acidity curdles the milk, separating curds from the clear whey.
Lemon juice
Acts as an optional acid that can curdle the milk in place of the sherry.

The step that matters

Add the sherry and bring to a boil again. Adding the acid to milk that is already boiling makes it curdle; the curds then separate from the clear whey when strained, so the boil must be reached again for a clean separation.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sherry, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sherry, sugar. 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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