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Whey, Lemon
Let the quantity of milk required boil, and stir into it when boiling as much strained lemon-juice as will turn the milk. Let it boil a minute or two, cool it, and strain off the whey. Add as much water as will make it an agreeable beverage, sweeten, and it will be ready for use. Whey thus made is less heating than that for which wine is used. When they are liked, the curds may be sweetened, flavoured with nutmeg, and eaten. They are rather indigestible, and should certainly be avoided by an invalid.
A sickroom drink rather than a dessert: milk is deliberately split with lemon juice, the solids discarded, and the thin liquid diluted and sweetened. Cassell's gives no quantities at all, so the proportions below are a working starting point.
- ProportionsFor 1 pint (about 570 ml) milk, 2 to 3 tablespoons of strained lemon juice should be enough to curdle it; add it gradually and stop as soon as the mixture separates. The recipe gives no quantities, and the amount of whey recovered will vary with the milk.
- Use ordinary pasteurised whole milkUltra-pasteurised and UHT milk tend to give a finer, softer curd and a cloudier whey. Standard pasteurised whole milk generally separates more decisively.
- The hinge: add acid off a rolling boilBring the milk just to the boil, then lower the heat before the lemon juice goes in. Hard boiling after the split toughens the curd and pushes scorched flavour into the whey, which is the only part you are keeping.
- "Boil a minute or two"Thirty seconds of gentle heat is enough to complete the separation. Longer only concentrates a cooked-milk taste.
- StrainingMuslin or a coffee filter in a sieve gives a clear, pale-gold whey; a plain kitchen sieve leaves it milky. Let it drip rather than pressing the curd.
- Dilution and sweeteningThe recipe leaves "an agreeable beverage" to the cook; roughly one part water to two parts whey, with a teaspoon or two of sugar or honey, is one workable reading. Serve warm for a sickroom drink, or well chilled.
- The curdsWhat is left is a fresh acid-set curd, comparable to paneer. The book's warning that they are "rather indigestible" reflects nineteenth-century invalid theory rather than any modern concern; drain them and treat them as fresh cheese.
- "Less heating than that for which wine is used"A reference to the older wine whey, in which wine (sherry being a common choice) did the curdling. "Heating" here is humoral language, meaning stimulating rather than hot in temperature.
Whey drinks belong to the large nineteenth-century literature of invalid cookery, the section of the household manual devoted to feeding the sick, and Cassell's places this one squarely in that tradition. Before intravenous fluids and commercial rehydration salts, a sweetened, mildly acidic, easily swallowed liquid was one of the few things a fever patient could be given, and cookery books offered something like a graded ladder of them, broadly running from barley water and toast water through whey and beef tea to solid food. Wine whey was the older and better-known form, and it is the one this entry measures itself against; lemon whey is offered as the less heating alternative, avoiding the alcohol that medical opinion of the day thought unsuited to certain fevers. The reservation about the curds is a period judgement rather than a culinary one, and the recipe still allows for them: they may be sweetened, flavoured with nutmeg and eaten when liked oday as as paneer or ricotta-style fresh cheese.