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WINE WHEY
One pint of boiling milk, two wine-glasses of wine, boil a moment, stirring well; take out the curd, sweeten and flavor the whey.
A sick-room drink from the era when whey was considered the gentlest form of nourishment. It is essentially milk deliberately curdled with fortified wine, the solids strained off and the sweetened liquid drunk warm.
- The wine-glassA wine-glass in nineteenth-century American cookbooks is about 2 fluid ounces, so two of them come to 1/2 cup. That is a substantial dose of wine against a pint of milk.
- Which wineSherry, Madeira and port are the wines most often named in period versions of wine whey. A fortified wine curdles milk quickly and reliably; a dry table wine will work but gives a thinner, sharper result.
- The hinge: boil only a momentThe wine goes into milk already at a boil, and the mixture needs no more than a few seconds to separate. Prolonged boiling toughens the curd and scorches the milk sugars at the bottom of the pan.
- Taking out the curdPour through a fine sieve or a doubled square of cheesecloth rather than fishing the curd out with a spoon. The whey should come through pale, faintly greenish and clear.
- Sweeten and flavorPeriod recipes commonly pair the sugar with grated nutmeg, a strip of lemon peel, or a little cinnamon. Season the strained whey while it is still hot so the sugar dissolves.
- Alcohol contentA few seconds at a boil removes only a little of the alcohol. The finished whey is still a mildly alcoholic drink, which is worth knowing before serving it to anyone unwell, elderly or young.
- YieldA pint of milk plus a half cup of wine gives most of that volume back as whey once the curd is lifted out -- one or two invalid servings. Serve warm in a cup; it separates and turns sour if held.
Whey drinks were a fixture of English and American sick-room cookery for centuries, resting on the idea that the curd was the heavy, hard-to-digest part of milk and the watery whey the nourishing, cooling part. Wine whey in particular appears in medical and domestic manuals well before Buckeye Cookery (1877), usually recommended for fevers and convalescence, where it delivered a little sugar, a little liquid and a stimulant dose of alcohol to a patient who could not manage solid food. Its place here in the "Food For The Sick" chapter reflects a household economy in which nursing happened at home and the cook, not a pharmacist, prepared what the doctor prescribed. The related preparations of the period follow the same logic: rennet whey, tamarind whey, mustard whey, each curdled by a different agent and each credited with slightly different virtues.