Posset
hot drink made of milk curdled with wine or ale
A posset (, historically also spelled possyt, possot, poosay, poshote or poshotte), was originally a popular hot drink made of milk curdled with wine or ale, often spiced, which was often used as a remedy. In the 18th century, it was reportedly only drunk in Sweden, Norway and England.
The original drink became extinct and the name was revived in the 19th century and applied to a cream, sugar and citrus-based confection, which is consumed today as a cold set dessert nearly indistinguishable from syllabub.
Introduction
To make the drink, milk was heated to a boil, then mixed with wine or ale, which curdled it, and spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon.
It was considered a specific remedy for some minor illnesses, such as a cold, and a general remedy for others, as even today people drink hot milk to help them sleep.
History
The OED traces the word to the 15th century: various Latin vocabularies translate balducta, bedulta, or casius as "poshet", "poshoote", "possyt", or "possot". Russell's Boke of Nurture (c. 1460) lists various dishes and ingredients that "close a mannes stomak", including "þe possate".
Posset is frequently used as a starting point for other recipes (e.g. "Make a styf Poshote of Milke an Ale", and "Take cowe Mylke, & set it ouer þe fyre, & þrow þer-on Saunderys, & make a styf poshotte of Ale", each of which is the first sentence of a longer recipe).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Posset” as hot drink made of milk curdled with wine or ale. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as hot drink made of milk curdled with wine or ale. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3576426. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1460.
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This entry incorporates text from “Posset” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.