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Wine Whey
One cup of new milk; one-half cup of sherry wine; sugar to sweeten. Place the milk in a small saucepan set in another of boiling water. When the milk boils, add the wine, stir well, and leave in a mild heat until the curd and whey separate; then strain, sweeten and serve.
A two-ingredient invalid drink that works by acid curdling: the wine's acidity coagulates the casein, leaving a thin, faintly sweet, faintly alcoholic liquid. The hinge is temperature — the milk must be hot enough to curdle cleanly but never boiled hard once the wine is in, or the whey turns cloudy and the curd tough.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, at the time this was written often straight from the dairy and unpasteurised. Ordinary whole milk works; skim gives a meagre curd and a watery result. It is brought to the boil here, so raw milk is not required.
- The double saucepan"A small saucepan set in another of boiling water" is a bain-marie, not a direct flame. The point is gentle, even heat that will not scorch the milk on the bottom — a heatproof bowl over simmering water does the same thing.
- "Mild heat"Keep the water beneath at a bare simmer and leave the pan until the break comes. Separation is complete when the liquid under the curd looks translucent and greenish-yellow rather than milky.
- The sherryHalf a cup to one cup of milk is a strong dose by modern standards. A dry or medium sherry is the safer choice; a sweet cream sherry tastes cloying here. Much of the alcohol survives -- this is not an alcohol-free drink, whatever its place in the invalid chapter.
- StrainingA fine sieve lined with a double thickness of muslin or a coffee filter gives the clear whey the recipe intends. The recipe says nothing about the curd left behind, though it is edible.
- SweeteningSweeten after straining, as directed. A teaspoon or two is usually enough; the whey should taste mild, not syrupy.
- Yield and servingSomething over a cup once the curd is strained out, one serving. Serve warm in a cup or glass; it is made to order.
Whey drinks were a fixture of European sickroom cookery for centuries before this book: wine whey, rennet whey and lemon whey all appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domestic manuals as light nourishment for patients who could not manage solid food. The reasoning was that whey carried the "nutritive" part of milk in a form that would not lie heavy on the stomach, while the wine served as a stimulant and a mild sedative — a view of alcohol as medicine that persisted in household books into the twentieth century, and the Butterick volume gave over a whole section to Foods for Invalids. Such chapters were standard in American cookbooks of the period because home nursing was ordinary domestic work, and a cook was expected to produce beef tea, gruel, panada and whey on the doctor's instruction. The technique itself is simply acid coagulation, the same chemistry behind ricotta and paneer, put to a different purpose.