English Lemon Posset

This was originally a drink (beginning in the 1300s?) of warmed curdled milk with wine and some spices that was also used for medicinal purposes for colds and flu, but by around the 1500s or 1600s, the recipe had shifted to something more of a pudding that was thickened without the use of eggs, flour or starch. By that time, citrus fruits were becoming more available in England, as trade and shipping made many previously scarce items much more available, and at lower cost. Posset is incredibly easy to make, but you need to use the basic ingredients of heavy cream, sugar and lemon juice, or likely it won't thicken properly.

 

Ingredients (4 to 6, depending upon serving size):

 

2 cups heavy cream

5 tablespoons lemon juice

1 tablespoon lemon zest

2/3 cup sugar

blueberries and/or raspberries and/or blackberries and/or strawberries, rinsed and drained on paper towels (you don't want them dripping with water)

In a heavy bottomed sauce pan, bring the cream, sugar and lemon zest to a boil over medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Adjust the heat to maintain a light, steady boil and let the mixture boil for 10 minutes, then remove it from the heat. Add the lemon juice and stir to mix it in well, then let the posset sit for about 15 minutes to begin to cool down (it will have begun to thicken somewhat). If you want the posset to be super smooth, strain it, but myself, I don't mind the fine lemon zest, which is barely detectable, so I don't strain it. Either way, then pour the strained or unstrained posset into ramekins or glasses and refrigerate them for about 4 hours (I cover them with plastic wrap after they have cooled a bit, or moisture may collect on the inside of the plastic wrap), until the posset is firmly set. To serve, sprinkle some berries on top of each serving.

 

Lemon Posset with raspberries, then plain, then with blueberries ...

WORD HISTORY:  

Beach-This word's ancient ancestry is uncertain, although it may go back to something like Indo European "bhog/bhok/bhak," meaning "moving/flowing/streaming water." Old Germanic had "bakiz," meaning "stream," and also "the land area adjacent to a stream, worn away by the running water." This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "bec" (dative: "bece"), meaning "small stream," and this then became "bæche, bæch, bæcche," by which time the meaning of "the sandy and/or pebble covered area along a shoreline" began to push to the forefront, where it has remained (Note: English had words that easily filled any void for the "stream" meaning: stream, creek, brook). The early part of the 1800s saw the verb form develop, meaning, "to run a water going vessel into the shore," and later also it came to be applied to whales, dolphins and porpoises. "Beach ball," an inflated ball typically batted and tossed around in water, seems to have been developed in the late 1930s (originally much smaller than what came along a couple of decades later). Relatives in the other Germanic languages: German has "Bach" (brook, stream, creek), Low German has "Beek" (creek, brook), Dutch has "beek" (brook), Danish has "bæk" (brook), Norwegian has "bekk" (brook), Icelandic has the now archaic "bekkur" (brook), Swedish has "bäck" (brook, stream).