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White-Wine Whey
Let a pint of milk come to a boil; add half a gill of white-wine; allow the whole to come to a boil, and pour into a basin to cool. When the curd has settled, the whey is excellent for coughs and colds. Hop Tea. This is considered good as an appetizer and strengthener of the digestive organs. Take one-half ounce of hops, upon which is poured a quart of boiling water; let it stand fifteen minutes; strain, and give a small teacupful half an hour before breakfast.
Two sick-room preparations run together on one page: a wine whey and a hop infusion. Both are simple, but the measures are old and the medical claims attached to them are not ones a modern cook should take at face value.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup, or 2 fl oz. Against a pint of milk that is a fairly generous proportion of wine.
- Which white wineA dry, fairly acidic table wine suits the purpose best; sherry and Madeira were used in related whey drinks, though this recipe simply says white-wine. Anything off-dry will curdle less cleanly; a sharp dry white gives the firmest curd.
- The hinge: let it separate undisturbedBring the milk to a boil, add the wine, return it briefly to a boil, then pour it into a basin and leave it alone. Stirring or agitating breaks the curd into fine particles that will not settle, and you end up with cloudy whey rather than the clear yellowish liquid wanted.
- StrainingThe original relies on settling alone. A pass through muslin or a fine sieve is faster and gives a cleaner result. The curd is small, so most of the liquid comes through as whey — one or two sick-room servings.
- AlcoholBoiling drives off much but not all of the alcohol, and what remains stays in the whey rather than the curd. It is not a drink for children.
- Hop tea proportionsHalf an ounce of dried hops is about 14 g, a substantial quantity for a quart of water; fifteen minutes of steeping yields a very bitter infusion. Some modern hop varieties are bred far higher in alpha acids than older field hops, so it is worth tasting before committing to the full weight.
- Serve it freshBoth preparations were made in single doses for a reason. Whey sours quickly and hop tea turns muddy and more bitter on standing; make only what will be drunk.
- On the claimsNeither drink treats a cough, a cold or a digestive complaint. Read them as light, palatable things to give someone who will not eat, which is what the sick-room chapters were mostly for.
Wine whey belongs to a long family of "whey drinks" that ran through English domestic medicine from the seventeenth century onward — milk broken with wine, ale, vinegar, lemon juice or rennet, the curd discarded and the thin liquid given to invalids. It was cheap, easy on a weak stomach, and carried a small measure of alcohol at a time when wine itself was considered restorative; recipes for sack whey, vinegar whey and rennet whey appear in household books well before this one. Hops, meanwhile, were a standard bitter tonic, prescribed on the old principle that bitterness "stirs the appetite" — the same logic behind gentian, wormwood and the aperitif tradition. That both appear among the remedies for the nursery and the sickroom reflects how domestic cookbooks of the period doubled as home nursing manuals, since a doctor's visit was an expense and the woman of the house was expected to manage minor illness with what stood in the kitchen.