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Whey, Vinegar
Make a pint of milk boil, and stir into it when boiling a glassful of vinegar. Let it boil from one to two minutes, cool it, and strain off the whey. A little water and sugar may be added if liked. Vinegar whey, like lemon whey, is less heating than wine whey, and it promotes perspiration just as well.
A sickroom drink rather than a dish: milk is curdled with acid, the solids strained out, and the thin sweetened liquid drunk warm. It takes about ten minutes.
- The hinge is the strainOnce the milk has broken into curds and clear greenish whey, pour it through a fine sieve lined with muslin or a coffee filter and let it drip without pressing. Squeezing the curd pushes fine solids through and leaves the whey cloudy and chalky rather than clear.
- "A glassful"In Victorian invalid cookery this probably means a wineglass, about 2 fl oz (4 tablespoons), though the book does not say. That is a generous amount of acid for a pint of milk; 2 to 3 tablespoons of ordinary 5% vinegar will break a pint cleanly.
- A pintCassell's is British, so the pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), not the American 16. The difference is not critical here.
- Choose the milkWhole pasteurised milk curdles best. Ultra-pasteurised or UHT milk tends to give a weaker, finer curd that separates less cleanly, leaving a murkier liquid and less clear whey.
- Vinegar typeUse distilled white or cider vinegar. Malt vinegar carries too much flavour into what is meant to be a mild drink, and balsamic will colour it.
- Don't overboilOne to two minutes is right. Held longer at a boil the curd tightens and the whey can pick up a cooked flavour; most of the separation happens very quickly once the acid goes in.
- YieldA pint of milk gives roughly 1 1/2 cups of whey, one or two servings. Sweeten lightly if liked; the recipe directs cooling before straining, so it is served cool rather than hot.
- The curdsWhat is left in the cloth is essentially a fresh acid-set cheese, close to a rough paneer or a very plain ricotta-style curd. Salt it and eat it rather than discarding it.
- "Less heating"This is humoral language, not nutrition. It reflects a belief that wine-based drinks inflamed the patient; it carries no modern meaning, and the claim about promoting perspiration should be read the same way.
Whey drinks belong to the old category of invalid cookery, a section many nineteenth-century household manuals carried, alongside beef tea, gruel and barley water. Whey was regarded as light, cooling and easily kept down by patients who could manage nothing else, and it came in a small family of variants distinguished only by the acid used to break the milk: wine whey, lemon whey, tamarind whey, cream of tartar whey, and this cheapest version made with vinegar. The ranking implied here — that vinegar and lemon are "less heating" than wine — is a survival of humoral medicine, in which foods were classed as heating or cooling and fevers were treated by avoiding the former; the notion of a sudorific drink that would "promote perspiration" and so break a fever belongs to the same system. By the time this book was printed, the medical theory was residual but the recipes had outlived it, kept in print because they were cheap, bland and quickly made from what was already in the house.