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SACK WHEY (for Invalids)
Boil a pint of milk, and as it rises in the pan stir into it three glasses of sherry. Let the liquid boil once more, pour it out, and let it stand till the curd forms. Filter the whey, sweeten, dilute it, or not, with a little water, and serve.
A two-ingredient invalid drink from the era when whey was treated as medicine. The technique is simply acid-plus-heat curdling, and the only real skill is in the straining.
- "Three glasses" of sherryA Victorian wine glass is roughly 2 to 2.5 fl oz, so three glasses is about 6 to 7 fl oz — a generous ratio to a pint of milk. Cassell's does not specify, and if you want a milder whey, start with 4 fl oz and add more only if the curd refuses to separate.
- Sack means sherry"Sack" was the old English name for fortified white wine from Spain and the Canaries, which is why the title says sack while the instruction calls for sherry. A dry or medium amontillado behaves as intended; cream sherry adds sugar you will then be sweetening again.
- A pintIf you are working from the British edition, the pint is 20 fl oz. American readers should use 20 fl oz rather than 16 to keep the proportion of wine to milk in the range the recipe assumes.
- Watch the pan, not the clockThe milk should be brought just to the point of rising, not held at a rolling boil. Scorched milk solids will taint the whey, and there is no way to strain the flavour back out.
- Let the curd set undisturbedThis is the hinge. Stirring or shaking the pan after the second boil breaks the curd into fine particles that pass straight through the cloth and leave the whey cloudy. The recipe says only to let it stand till the curd forms; leave it alone off the heat until it has.
- Filtering"Filter" here means straining through several layers of muslin or a scalded jelly bag, not paper. Do not press or squeeze the curd; let it drain by gravity or the liquid turns milky.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield, and the wine adds to the liquid, so expect rather more whey than the milk alone would suggest. Sack whey was generally taken warm. Two brief boils will not drive off all the alcohol, so some remains in the drink; bear that in mind for children or anyone avoiding it.
Whey — the thin liquid left when milk curdles — was a staple of British invalid cookery for centuries, valued as something nourishing that a feverish patient could keep down when milk itself sat heavily. Sack whey appears in domestic manuals and household pharmacopoeias well before Cassell's, alongside its relatives wine whey, vinegar whey and lemon whey, all made by the same trick of curdling hot milk with an acid and pouring off the clear liquid. The name preserves "sack", the Elizabethan word for fortified Spanish wine, familiar from Falstaff and from sack posset, the far richer curdled-cream drink served at weddings and on cold nights.