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ALUM WHEY
Mix half ounce powdered alum with one pint sweet milk, strain and add sugar and nutmeg; it is good in hemorrhages, and sometimes for colic.
This is a nineteenth-century sickroom remedy rather than a food, and the dose of alum in it is the problem. It is worth reading for what it says about domestic medicine, not for making.
- The alum is the whole issueHalf an ounce is roughly 14 grams of potassium aluminium sulphate in a single pint. Alum is astringent and irritating to the stomach and gut in gram quantities; ingesting this much at once can cause vomiting, severe gastric irritation and worse. Modern food use of alum is limited to a fraction of a teaspoon in a whole batch of pickles.
- What "whey" means hereThe alum is doing what rennet or acid would do in cheesemaking: it curdles the pint of milk so the curd can be strained off and the thin liquid drunk. "Strain" in the original most likely means discarding the curds rather than straining out the alum, much of which remains in the whey.
- The medical claimAlum's astringency was believed to check bleeding, hence "good in hemorrhages." There is no evidence that drinking it stops internal bleeding, and anyone with a haemorrhage in 2024 needs a hospital, not a beverage.
- "Sweet milk"In Buckeye Cookery this simply means fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk also kept in the kitchen. It is not sweetened.
- If you want the historical textureWheys curdled with acid or wine belong to the same tradition without the alum. Use a current recipe if you want to make one.
The "Food For The Sick" chapters of American household manuals sat on the boundary between cookery and pharmacy, and in the 1870s that boundary was genuinely blurred: the housewife was often the first medical resource in the home. Whey preparations of various kinds descend from a long European tradition of giving invalids thin, easily swallowed liquids, and each was apparently thought to carry the medicinal virtue of whatever curdled it. Alum was a cheap, ubiquitous commodity in the period, kept in kitchens for pickling crispness and in workshops for dyeing and papermaking, and its puckering astringency was read as evidence that it would tighten tissue and stanch bleeding inside the body as it seemed to do on the tongue. Entries like this one largely dropped out of later American cookbooks as domestic medicine was handed over to physicians and the patent-drug trade.