Is there a friendly jell-o posset comparison for Minnesotans? Or maybe cream-of-posset soup?

The word "possnet/posnet" was to me unknowe:

A small metal pot or vessel for boiling, having a handle and three feet.

saith the OED.

I see from the citations there that it had no special relation to possets, either etymologically or in its range of uses.

At first I wondered whether it was a very early, very rare instance of portmanteau coinage, i.e. some sort of net for use in cooking possets.
But no; even though there's a posset in this posnet, there's no "posset" in "possnet."

(Though Sir Digby's inclination to spell its name with a double 's' may betray some attraction via folk etymology?)

The obvious offering in this case is a lovely soft custard, with powder of Cinnamon and Sugar upon it.

But alas, I cannot make possets! Vellem, si possim.

Take one carton cherry jelleaux, with the redde lettres on the box, and make as for glace or aspick, but do not let firme. In a cawldron, take two pints thunderbyrd, or four roses, or nyquille, and add an equal measure of good strong hamm's ale, and warm it with A&P spice as for pumpkin pye. Add this to the warm jelleaux, and add then one tubb of coolwhippe gently or as much reddiwhip as to make a posset.

Which would present practical problems - not only is the real stuff very rare, but the trade in it is illegal in a lot of places

It tasted a good deal like a mild eggnog. Not quite as rich, slightly less strongly flavored (hers had a lime flavoring), but warm and pleasant. Both it and the hot butterscotch drink (which was amazing) were deemed "Tasty, but curiously involved for a before bedtime drink."

I'm surprised Digby didn't suggest Cyprus sugar (the lowest grade).

I offer the gnomes some herbal tea, and an apology.

[There's a triple-space hidden in your name. -- Jios Biro, Duty Gnome]

Possibly for the inferior quality of the bribe offered too. Or for an extra space in the header.

Nowadays, I make my living writing recipes for using CAE software. "Enter an element size and choose the appropriate midnode curvature method. Click OK.") It's basically the same thing. I learned technical writing from Midwestern churchwomen.

Is this bureaucratic and/or legislative stupidity?

The reason why the feathers ban makes sort-of sense: it's impossible to tell if the bird was killed for the feathers or if they're found shed or after accidental death.

But nobody kills sperm whales for ambergris, and nobody ever killed them with that as a goal; if they found some, it was a bonus.

Does it act like cheesecloth, for letting liquid drain out?

Sack = dry sherry, aged in port barrels.

White muscadine ~~ moscato.

A modernized recipe for a small, low-calorie posset, made rapidly, using the most modern ingredients and conveniences.

Put 1 cup milk in the microwave in a Pyrex measuring cup until it starts to foam. Meanwhile, beat an egg in a drinking mug (hold a whisk between your hands and spin it) with sugar to taste (a rounded teaspoon or so); get someone to pour the milk slowly into the egg, beating the whole time. Add a slug of rum (Appleton's is best), and grate some nutmeg on top. (This is a favorite winter drink at our house.)

Less of a bonus than you might think: ambergris "straight from the whale" looks like wet blubber and smells, bluntly, of crap; it requires several months (possibly even years) of exposure to light and oxygen to develop its desirable properties.

*from what you didn't use from your cows till past drinking

Similarly, is "ambered sugar" brown sugar, or is it sugar with actual (probably powdered) amber in it?

SamChevre, #23: That sounds remarkably like a 1-person version of my mother's recipe for boiled custard -- except that, as a good Methodist, she didn't add rum, and she typically used vanilla extract rather than nutmeg for flavoring. These days I'd be leery of drinking it because of the salmonella issue* -- I used to be able to find commercial boiled custard in the stores during the Christmas season, but these days all there seems to be is eggnog, which I don't really like.

* And wouldn't it be nice if, instead of solemn health warnings about consuming raw eggs, we had poultry-farming regulations which would remove the risk of salmonella?

... 1,300 eggs, twenty gallons of milk, eight gallons of cream, thirteen barrels of beer, twenty-seven barrels of ale, a barrel of beer of the great assize, and a runlet of wine of fifteen gallons

suggests that they were feeding beer and ale to the commoners and syllabub to the gentry.

If you're pouring boiling milk into it, the egg will be pretty well cooked.

You can also pasteurize your own eggs before use, or occasionally buy pasteurized eggs.

The temperatures are a bit finicky. If the milk is at 180, and the egg and cup are at 80 (I usually fill the mug with hot tap water to warm it), the finished custard is at 160. I've always assumed that if I'm getting it hot enough to thicken, it should kill any bacteria. If the egg is cold and the mug is also, it won't thicken unless the milk is actively boiling.

The only difference from boiled custard is that, done right, you get a high head of foam--it can be an inch thick or more.

I'd go with the pastils.

Can't help you on "ambered sugar", I'm afraid, because I'd never heard of it before today either.

"It doth very well with it, to put into the Sack..."

. . . sounds like a cooking instruction.

Looking back up toward the top, I see "half a pint of Sack or White muscadin," which could have clued me in if I wasn't still squicked by the thought of all those eggs. Not an egg fan.

Is there a friendly jell-o posset comparison for Minnesotans? Or maybe cream-of-posset soup?

Dissolve the powdered gelatin in 1 cup of boiling water, but don't add the second cup of water called for in the directions. Let the solution cool until it's syrupy but not set. Put into a blender and process while adding fresh or frozen fruit, then Greek yogurt. It will be thick, so keep the machine running. Temper it up with orange juice until the consistency is right.

Oldster @5: Kenelm Digby's spelling is at all times charmingly informal.

Dave Crisp @10: What is and isn't suitable for flavoring food is another one of those issues that changes over time. Our culture seldom uses rosewater in cooking, relegates vanilla to a background note, and doesn't use ambergris at all.

I think I'd prefer a tiny dab of perfumer's amber, which smells sweet enough to rival vanilla.

Cyllan @11:

It tasted a good deal like a mild eggnog. Not quite as rich, slightly less strongly flavored (hers had a lime flavoring), but warm and pleasant. Both it and the hot butterscotch drink (which was amazing) were deemed "Tasty, but curiously involved for a before bedtime drink."

What the combination of alcohol, carbohydrates, and warm milk suggests to me is a sleeping potion. Also, in an era without central heating, it would send you to bed feeling warm and comfortable.

Matthew Jude Brown @17, 19: Or the rule may exist for nonstupid reasons we don't yet know. A well-run bureaucracy is one of the foundation stones of civilization.

Have you ever had to help draft laws, regulations, or rule sets? Clarity and simplicity (insofar as they're attainable) are major virtues. A law that can't be understood or administered is pretty much by definition a bad law.

It's impossible to predict all the ways people might interact with an endangered species, and trying to do so would result in unmanageably complex and bizarre-looking laws. On the other hand, "Don't do anything, just leave them alone" is easily understood, and covers most eventualities.

===

And a general comment: two different substances get called amber, and neither of them are ambergris. The kind of amber that's petrified tree sap can be used in perfumes, but I can't imagine it being attractive if used in food. The other kind of amber looks a lot like penuche candy, melts at a relatively low temperature, has a mellow and intensely sweet smell, will sublimate if left uncovered, and isn't priced high enough to contain ambergris. I've been assuming that this is the kind of amber Kenelm Digby had in mind.

Unless you're making a joke that's too subtle for me. :)

I am, in point of fact, an abysmal speller. It's only by very diligent overcompensation that I get it right as often as I do.

OK, sophomoric. But it got the job done.

Theresa @ 50 'Twould be the very one I bought for the recipe Mac sent me. (Dry Sack, that is. But no little bag. Alas.)

"Ask me no reason why I love you; for though
Love use Reason for his physician, he admits him
not for his counsellor. You are not young, no more
am I; go to then, there's sympathy: you are merry,
so am I; ha, ha! then there's more sympathy: you
love sack, and so do I; would you desire better
sympathy?"

Surely no woman can resist the flattery of being called an old, cackling, sherry-tippler.
And yet once they have compared letters, the wives will be merrier than Falstaff can imagine....

*Our house was surrounded with pine trees that dripped sap which crystallized into appetizing-looking lumps. As a kid I read somewhere that you could chew hardened pine sap, so I tried it. It crumbled unpleasantly, then became chewable, but the BLAST! OF!! TURPENTINE!!! flavor was unforgettable.

Labdanum is much valued in perfumery because of its resemblance to ambergris, which has been banned from use in many countries because its precursor originates from the sperm whale, which is an endangered species; although the best-quality ambergris is found free-floating or washed up onshore (long exposure to sunlight, air and water removes offensive-smelling components of the fresh substance), and thus raises no ethical objections, a lower-quality version can also be recovered from some fraction of freshly slaughtered whales, and so may encourage poaching of sperm whales. (emphasis mine)

So, not "stupid bureaucracy", but "greedy people" -- as with the eagle feathers, there's no easy way to tell whether the ambergris you're buying was found on the beach or taken from an illegally-slaughtered animal. Absent a level of worldwide bureaucratic involvement/oversight that I'm sure would be even less welcome to you, the only plausible course is to ban it altogether.

We've been steadily working on our Smoking Bishop recipe for a few holiday seasons, now, and it gets a little more wonderful every year. One of the tricky bits is working out substitutions for ingredients that were available to Dickens, frex, but don't show up in the local supermarket around Christmastime.

But that's also a big part of the fun of reconstructing historical recipes.

'Amber sugar' I would expect to be sugar in which ambergris had been kept, as with rose sugar and violet sugar, both of which have a long history.

Buttered Eggs by Robert May (1685 edition)

Take 20 eggs, beat them in a dish with some salt and put butter to them; then have two large rouls or fine manchets, cut them into toasts & toast them against the fire with a pound of fine sweet butter; being finely buttered, lay the toasts in a fair clean scowred dish, put the eggs on the toasts, and garnish the dish with pepper and salt. Otherwise half boil them in the shells, then butter them, and serve them on toasts, or toasts about them.
To these eggs sometimes use musk and ambergriece, and no pepper.

"Sherry" itself is, of course, another one of those corruptions (of Jerez, in this case).

Sir Kenelm's street fight description has clearly been written by someone who's read far too much Latin in his life and thinks that copying Latin grammar in English is a good idea. I mean, the following is one sentence:

After Theagenes had remained some time thus beating down their swords and wounding many of them, and shewing wonderful effects of a settled and not transported valour, and that their beginning to slack their fury in pressing upon him gave a little freedom to his thoughts, all his spirits being before united in his heart and hands, he considered how it must certainly be some mistake that made him to be thus treated by men that he knew not, and to whom he was sure in his particular could have given no offence, being but that day arrived in Alexandria from very remote parts; wherefore he spoke to them in the best manner he could, to make himself understood in a tongue that he was not well master of, and asked what moved them to use him so discourteously that was a stranger there, and was not guilty of having injured any of them; to which words of his, one that seemed to be of the best quality among them, by a cassock embroidered with gold which he wore over his jack of mail, answered him with much fury in his manner.

Dear Sir Kenelm, I am going to confiscate your conjunctions and semicolons. (NB: did the original printing include punctuation, or did later editors add it?)

During my last stay in hospital, I was reading On Food And Cooking on my Kindle (which is not a good tool for works of an encyclopedic nature). And one thing I recall is that boiling away the alcohol is difficult. It only happens slowly. Since the recipe says that you take a half-point of sack and "boil a very little" with the sugar and other ingredients, I doubt you lose much alcohol. Indeed, a chafing dish is more to keep a plate of food warm than to cook it, and the purpose is to warm the mixture enough for the sugar to dissolve. We're talking some 340g of sugar in 280ml of liquid, or did Sir Kenelm's recipe use the wine measure, from which the US pint is derived?

Since the milk-and-eggs element are also heated, the hot sugar solution probably isn't going to cool out enough for the sugar to start crystallizing, and some of the proteins from the egg may also have an effect. Come to think of it, the protein-encapsulated fats in the milk will also help.

It's all starting to sound like an alcoholic milk shake.

[You think I should say otherwise, on this day of all days? No, sir, I shall not! For am I not English, with the blood of a thousand lesser realms blended in my veins, child of an Empire on which the sun never set. Let not it be said that the English are bigoted. We just understand you better if you play cricket.]

I think the Tom and Jerry is another vestigial posset.

Given Falstaff's reputation, I'm not sure he is calling the lady a sherry-tippler when he intimates that she might like to join him in the sack...

Teresa @41 -- I will bring some fruit for that!

The zabaglione I make has no cream whatsoever. Of course, it then gets folded into a whipped cream/mascarpone mixture to make the non-ladyfinger part of tiramisu.

For some reason, custards seem a lot more finicky than similar things not containing milk. Even Jello-mix custards can go wrong for me.

The Holy Roman Empire had U-Bet chocolate syrup?

Well, in those days, it was known as V-Bet.

[We gnomes don't mind Bosco; it's three spaces in a row we abhor. -- Pormix Milleta, Duty Gnome]

We went through a hell of a lot of seltzer.

I recall finding U-Bet in some surprising places. I don't recall specifically having to use another brand.

Caroline #58: 'Amber sugar' I would expect to be sugar in which ambergris had been kept, as with rose sugar and violet sugar, both of which have a long history.

Also vanilla sugar. I suspect that cinnamon sugar may have a similar history, though nowadays that usually means sugar mixed with powdered cinnamon.

Teresa #63: I'd say, rather that possets are a mostly-lost elaboration of what must have been a fairly ancient habit.

I didn't find anything that told me, but I did find some more Kenelm Digby posset recipes, including one which he's said to have got from the Earl of Carlisle. Which made me start to wonder about the social history of this kind of thing. There's something rather intriguing about the idea of seventeenth century noblemen getting together to swap recipes with one another. It makes me wonder whether alpha-male style competitive cooking has a longer history than we suppose. (It also got me imagining a version of the three musketeers in which the duels are replaced by bake-offs.)

If you have a Katz's Deli in your area, that would be the place to look for it. (I think Katz's is a chain, but I don't know how widespread.)