Posset

Posset was, for some four centuries, one of the great hot comfort drinks of the English-speaking world: hot milk or cream curdled with wine or ale, sweetened with sugar, and scented with nutmeg, cinnamon and mace. The acid and tannin of the alcohol split the warm milk into a soft, sweet, spiced curd floating over a spirituous whey, drunk and spooned from a special two-handled, spouted posset pot. It was at once a restorative, a nightcap, a winter warmer and a folk medicine for colds. The name now mostly means something else — a cold set cream-and-lemon dessert — but the drink came first.