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Posset, Ale
Boil a pint of new milk with a slice of toasted bread. Pour a bottle of mild ale into a bowl, add sugar and spices to taste, then pour the boiling milk over it. A fine head should rise.
A two-ingredient drink whose success hangs entirely on how the hot milk meets the cold ale. Everything else is seasoning.
- Pour high and do not stirThe recipe asks only that the boiling milk be poured over the ale. Traditional practice was to pour from a height and then leave the bowl alone, on the reasoning that stirring collapses the foam and drops the curd into the liquid.
- MeasuresA Victorian pint is 20 fl oz, about 2.4 US cups or 570 ml. Period ale bottles varied in size, so a 500 ml bottle is a reasonable stand-in; modern 330 ml bottles will give a milkier, sweeter result.
- New milkThis means fresh whole milk straight from the cow, unskimmed and unhomogenised. Whole milk works; the richer the better, and a splash of cream helps the head. Skimmed milk gives a thin, grey curd.
- Mild aleIn British usage "mild" originally distinguished young, unaged ale from kept or "old" ale; the lightly hopped, lightly sweet, often dark beer now called mild is a later form. A modern English mild, a brown ale or a soft bitter is a reasonable choice. Anything aggressively hopped or sour will turn the drink bitter.
- The toastThe slice of toasted bread is boiled with the milk; the recipe does not say whether it is lifted out before pouring or left in the bowl.
- SpicesGrated nutmeg is standard, with cinnamon, mace or a little ground ginger as alternatives. Add the sugar and spice to the cold ale so they dissolve before the milk arrives; two teaspoons of sugar is a reasonable starting point.
- Yield and servingMakes about a litre, enough for three or four small cups or two large ones. Serve immediately in warmed glasses or mugs while the head still stands; it separates within a few minutes.
Posset is recorded from the fifteenth century as poshote or possot, and always built on the same trick: hot milk poured onto wine or ale, which curdles it into a foamy top and a thin whey beneath. For centuries it was both a nightcap and a sickroom staple, thought to settle a cold or a chill, and wealthy households owned dedicated spouted posset pots so that the clear liquor could be sucked from below while the curd was spooned from above. Shakespeare's characters drink it, and it appears in domestic manuals well into the nineteenth century. The modern lemon posset, a set cream with no ale in sight, is a much later descendant that kept the name and abandoned the method.