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Posset, Sack
Boil some cream and sweet biscuits, grated; add sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Warm some sherry; stir it into the cream. Then pour the whole quickly from one vessel to another until it is quite smooth. Eggs beaten up in milk may be used instead of cream.
A late survival of the Stuart drink-cum-dessert, given here without a single quantity. The proportions below are conventional for a posset of this type and will get you a spoonable, frothy cup.
- Sack means sherry"Sack" was the English name for the fortified white wines of Spain and the Canaries (whether it was characteristically dry is disputed), and by the time this book was printed the two words were largely interchangeable, which is why the recipe says sherry outright. A dry or medium amontillado suits it better than a cream sherry, since the dish is already sweetened.
- "Sweet biscuits" are hard, dry onesThink Naples biscuits, ratafias, sponge fingers or a plain rusk — biscuits dry enough to grate on a box grater. A soft modern cookie will smear rather than grate; dry sponge fingers in a 300F oven for ten minutes first if they have gone limp.
- Working proportionsFor four small servings: 1 pint (2 cups) cream, 2 to 3 oz grated biscuit, 2 to 3 oz sugar, a good pinch each of cinnamon and grated nutmeg, and about 1/2 cup sherry. The biscuit is the thickener; add it gradually and judge by the body you want.
- The hinge is the temperature of the wineWarm the sherry only to blood heat and stir it into cream that has come off the boil, pouring in a thin stream. Boiling-hot cream meeting acidic wine curdles into hard curd and thin whey — early possets were deliberately made that way, but this version wants smoothness.
- Why you pour from vessel to vesselPassing the mixture repeatedly between two jugs held well apart aerates it, dissolves the grated biscuit evenly and raises the froth prized in a sack posset. Two warmed pitchers work; a blender will do the emulsifying but not the foam.
- The egg-and-milk versionBeat 4 eggs into a pint of milk and cook it as a stirred custard to about 175F, thick enough to coat a spoon, before the sherry goes in. It must not boil or it will scramble, and it should not be served under-cooked simply because there is wine in it.
- ServingPosset was drunk warm from handled cups or small glasses, dusted with more nutmeg, and it does not hold — the froth collapses and the biscuit settles quickly. Make it immediately before it goes to the table.
The posset appears in medieval sources as poshote — hot milk curdled with ale or wine, taken as much for a cold or a fever as for pleasure. Sack posset, made with the fortified Iberian wine the Elizabethans called sack, became the celebratory form: it was traditionally carried to newlyweds on the wedding night and drunk at Christmas. The recipe shows how far the dish had receded into custom: no quantities, no timings, just the shape of a dish the compiler assumed a reader would half-remember. The grated biscuit is the giveaway of the richer style — earlier possets relied on the curd itself for body, while by the seventeenth century versions thickened with cream, eggs and dried sponge until the drink became something closer to a spoon sweet.