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Ale Posset
Boil a pint of new milk and pour it over a slice of toasted bread. Stir in the beaten yolk of an egg, and a piece of butter the size of a nutmeg, and sugar to taste. Mix these with a pint of hot ale, and boil for a few minutes. When the scum rises it is sufficiently ready. Time, five minutes to boil. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four persons.
A hot curdled milk-and-ale drink, closer to a spoonable gruel than to anything you would sip from a glass. The whole point is that it separates, so the usual anxieties about curdling do not apply.
- Pints are imperialCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint of milk and a pint of ale come to about 2 1/2 US cups each. The finished quantity is a good quart before the curd rises.
- Choose the ale carefullyThe ale most likely intended here is a mild, malty, lightly hopped one, though Victorian brewing also produced heavily hopped pale and keeping ales. A modern IPA or anything heavily hopped will turn aggressively bitter once boiled and concentrated; a mild, brown ale or a soft bitter is much closer to intent.
- New milk"New milk" means fresh whole milk straight from the dairy, unskimmed and unhomogenised. Whole milk works; skimmed gives a thin, watery curd with little to hold together.
- Butter the size of a nutmegRoughly 1/2 oz, or a tablespoon. Old cookbooks size butter by nutmeg, walnut and egg, ascending in that order.
- The egg yolkBeat it with a little of the hot milk before it goes into the pan, otherwise it sets in strings. It is going to be boiled afterwards regardless, so it is fully cooked in the finished drink.
- Watch for the scum, not the clock"When the scum rises it is sufficiently ready" is the real instruction: the acid and alcohol in the ale throw the milk protein up as a thick pale curd on top. Once that raft forms, stop. Prolonged boiling drives off the alcohol and toughens the curd into rubbery flecks.
- The toastA slice of dry toast soaked in the hot milk breaks down and thickens the body of the drink. Use a firm white loaf; soft sandwich bread dissolves to paste.
- ServingFour small cups or handled mugs, taken hot with a spoon, since the curd sits on top and the thin whey below. Sweeten at the end, after tasting, as ale varies widely in bitterness.
Possets run back through medieval and early modern English cookery: hot milk deliberately curdled with ale, sack or wine, sweetened and spiced, and drunk as much for its supposed virtues as for pleasure. They belonged to the sickroom and the bedside, prescribed for colds, chills and sleeplessness, and a rich "sack posset" thickened with cream and eggs was also a celebratory drink at weddings and Christmas well into the eighteenth century. The word itself is old and its origin is uncertain, appearing in Middle English as poshet and similar forms. The modern lemon posset -- a set cream dessert with no ale in it at all -- is a much later descendant that kept the name and abandoned the method.