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To Make White Wine Whey
1235. Boil a pint and a half of skimmed milk, and two glasses of raisin or sherry wine, fifteen grains of purified nitre, and lemon-juice enough to turn the milk; boil it up, and then set it aside until the curd subsides; strain it, and add enough sugar to make it pleasant; one half to be taken on getting into bed, the other ten minutes afterwards.
This is not a beverage but a sickroom dose, and the reason it cannot be made today is in the third ingredient rather than in any technique.
- The nitre is the problem"Purified nitre" is potassium nitrate, sold by apothecaries as a diaphoretic and cooling salt. Fifteen grains is close to a gram, dissolved in a warm drink and swallowed in two halves ten minutes apart; potassium nitrate at that dose is a drug, not a seasoning, and is associated with gastric irritation and with methaemoglobinaemia. Nothing in the rest of the recipe mitigates it.
- Dosing language, not cookery language"One half to be taken on getting into bed, the other ten minutes afterwards" is a prescription. The book is passing on a domestic remedy meant to force a sweat in a feverish patient, and it should be read as medical history. If someone is ill, a doctor rather than a cookbook is the right authority.
- GrainsThe grain is an apothecaries' weight, about 65 milligrams. In cookery books of this era it turns up mainly where the kitchen and the medicine chest overlap, and its presence here points to a medicinal rather than a culinary preparation.
- Imperial pintPint -- If the pint is imperial, a pint and a half of skimmed milk is 30 fluid ounces, roughly 850 ml or about three and a half US cups. A "glass" of wine in recipes of this period is small, commonly reckoned at about two fluid ounces.
- Raisin wineRaisin wine was a homemade sweet wine fermented from dried grapes, and it has effectively vanished from commerce. Sherry is the surviving alternative the recipe itself offers.
- What "turn the milk" meansThe acid in the wine and lemon juice curdles hot milk, and straining off the solid curd leaves whey: a thin, faintly sweet, slightly alcoholic liquid. Wine whey without the nitre is simply an old warm drink, and a current recipe should be used for it.