Posset is a really traditionally British drink, going back over seven hundred years, which I have never ever tasted… maybe this is the Christmas when I will make some and try it. Essentially it is curdled milk, sweetened, heated, flavoured with grown sugar, spices or something seasonally alcoholic, and sometimes thickened with bread. I always associate it with old story books I read when I was young, Victorian children or invalids being given posset to ‘build them up’, and doing a little research into it and came across a list of writings where posset was drunk or offered:
- Lady Macbeth poisoned the guards posset, little caring whether it would kill them or not, so that her husband could murder the king
- David Balfour mention possets in Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Kay Harker drinks a posset in The Box of Delights, by John Masefield
- Possets are also mentioned in The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis
- and Mary Renault mentions the drink in her novel The Persian Boy
Alison Uttley, in her Recipes From an Old Farmhouse, mentions possets which she drank in her childhood, going back to the late 1800’s.
In the winter we often had possets. we had possets at Christmas and New Year, possets when we were ill and possets when we were starved (which is to say that we were frozen stiff from the weather, not that we were hungry). A starved child was a very cold child and I came home from my long walk from school starved in the winter nights. Then I had a posset of hot milk and bread cut into little squares, with a dash of rum and some brown sugar to bring the colour to my cheeks.
Men had possets, stronger, with rum or brandy, to revive them.
‘We will have a posset at the end of a sea-cola fire,’ says Shakespeare and we had possets by our own coal fire, from the coal dug in our own county.
Milk was curdled with ale to make a Christmas posset. Spices were added, cloves, and cinnamon, and a grate of nutmeg, and brown sugar. The posset was mulled on the hot stove, in a pewter tankard, and poured into smaller mugs of pewter when it was ready. The ale curdled the milk and made a froth like ‘lamb’s wool’, the old froth of roast apples once used in possets.
‘Lamb’s wool’ was another very old traditional warm milky, spicy drink, made from cider or beer, roasted apples, eggs, cream and sometimes ground almonds. It was typically drunk by wassailers!
Here is some more interesting information about possets… look at the picture of the posset pot!
http://www.historicfood.com/Posset%20Recipes.htm
Lois Elsden 