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POSSET, TREACLE (for a cold)
Boil half a pint of milk, and stir into it, as it is rising in the pan, one table-spoonful of good treacle. Let it boil until the curd separates, then strain it off, and serve the posset very hot. A little water may be added if it is too sweet, and dry toast may be eaten with it. Time, five or six minutes. Probable cost, 2 1/2d. Sufficient for one person.
A single-serving invalid drink of the sort Victorian cookery books kept alongside gruel and beef tea. It is a curdled-milk whey, and the point is the strained liquid, not the solids.
- The hinge: let it actually curdleThe heat, helped by the treacle's mild acidity, is what splits the milk. If you pull the pan before the curd has clearly separated into flecks and the liquid has gone thin and brownish, you have sweetened hot milk rather than a posset. Keep it at a bare boil and wait for the break.
- Treacle means molassesTreacle here is most likely black treacle: dark, faintly bitter cane molasses. American readers can use unsulphured molasses rather than blackstrap, which is harsher. Golden syrup is far milder and paler and would give a noticeably different drink.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. Use whole milk; skimmed gives a thin, watery whey.
- StrainingA fine sieve or a square of muslin. The curd is discarded — it will be rubbery and unpleasant — and the warm whey is what you drink, roughly a cupful.
- TimeFive or six minutes is realistic on a moderate flame, but watch it rather than the clock; milk with syrup in it climbs the pan fast and scorches on the bottom.
- SweetnessA tablespoon of treacle in a cupful of milk is very sweet. The recipe's own suggestion of a little water is worth taking, and dry toast is offered alongside.
- YieldOne serving, and it does not keep or reheat well. Make it fresh.
The posset began as a proper drink rather than a sickroom measure: from the fifteenth century onward it meant hot milk curdled with ale, wine or sack, sweetened and spiced, drunk from two-handled posset pots designed so the drinker could take the whey from a spout while the thick curd stayed above. By the nineteenth century the wine possets are often said to have given way to milk puddings and creams, though alcoholic possets persisted well into the period, and the name is generally associated with the invalid-cookery chapters, where treacle, vinegar or lemon juice replaced the alcohol as the curdling agent. Treacle itself was a standard household remedy for coughs and colds hrough the the Greek theriake, an antidote — and cheap cane molasses made it one of the few sweeteners a poor family could keep. The costing of 2 1/2d. for the whole thing places it firmly among the remedies a servant or a mother could produce without troubling a doctor.