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Treacle Posset
Boil half a pint of new milk, and as it is rising in the pan stir into it two table-spoonfuls of treacle. Boil until the curd separates, then drain it off, and boil the posset again. Treacle posset should be taken the last thing before going to bed. It is an excellent thing for promoting perspiration. Time, a few minutes. Probable cost, 2d. Sufficient for one person.
A one-cup bedtime drink of curdled milk, made in a few minutes. The whole point is the separation: what you drink is the sweetened whey, not the curd, so do not try to keep the mixture smooth.
- The hingeStir the treacle in just as the milk rises, then keep it at a boil until the solids visibly clump and can be strained out. If you pull it off the heat early you get sweet scalded milk rather than posset; the recipe then has you boil the drained posset a second time.
- TreacleBritish treacle here means dark cane treacle — roughly what an American cook would call molasses. Avoid blackstrap, which is bitter and much more strongly mineral; golden syrup is a different product and is unlikely to curdle the milk in the same way.
- New milk"New milk" is fresh whole milk straight from the cow, unskimmed. Ordinary whole milk works; the curd will be softer with homogenised milk but still separates.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. You will finish with noticeably less than that once the curd is drained off.
- StrainingA fine sieve or a square of muslin is enough. The drained curd is bland and rubbery, and the recipe gives it no further use.
- YieldOne mugful, as the book says. It does not keep — treacle posset is made and drunk on the spot.
- The medical claim"Promoting perspiration" reflects nineteenth-century thinking about sweating out a chill, not any modern understanding. Treat it as a hot sweet drink for a sore throat and nothing more.
Posset in its older sense is hot milk deliberately curdled with something acid — wine, ale, citrus or, as here, treacle — and it was drunk for centuries before it drifted into meaning the thick set cream dessert familiar today. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century versions were often rich and alcoholic, served in two-handled posset pots so the clear whey could be sipped from a spout while the spiced curd was spooned off the top. This treacle version is the cheap, sober, sickroom descendant: milk and molasses, twopence, no wine. Treacle itself was the sugar of the working-class larder in Victorian Britain, the by-product left after refining, and it carried a long-standing reputation as a mild cure-all — the word derives ultimately from the Greek theriake, an antidote.