San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
BiteCurious
This dessert is weird and delicious
One of the best desserts I’ve had recently is the posset at Octavia, Melissa Perello’s Pacific Heights restaurant, which recently woke up from pandemic hibernation. A marvel of old-style culinary science, the making of the ethereally creamy posset is much like the process behind creme fraiche. Essentially, high-fat dairy plus acid equals a thick and sultry mascarpone-like solution that’s much lighter than panna cotta and with a more concentrated citrus flavor. At Octavia, the posset sits in a bowl, a placid white pool; an avalanche of neonred raspberry granita is heaped on one side. Each spoonful dissolved with a shrug on my tongue, leaving behind a shock of sourness. But it wasn’t always like this.
Posset (pronounced poh-SET, though I habitually say PAW-set like a barbarian) is an English concoction that dates back to the 15th century. In those early days, it was a mixture of milk curdled in a Sherry-style wine or ale. According to historical literature research by scholar Khristian S. Smith, numerous references to posset in recipe books and fiction indicate that it functioned not only as a popular drink in that era, but as an aphrodisiac, plague remedy, digestif and, in the case of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, a sleeping potion. Teapot-like drinking vessels for posset enabled people to drink the liquid before eating the curds with a spoon after.
Hundreds of years later, drinking posset continued to be consumed in England, as indicated in this reference to ale posset in the 1894 book “A Righte Merrie Christmasse: The Story of Christ-Tide” by John Ashton. As a fun Christmas night activity, Ashton suggests brewing milk, bread and ale together with sugar, grated ginger and nutmeg.
Then things get spicy: “All the single folks gather round, each provided with a spoon. Then follows an interesting ceremony. A wedding ring, a bone button, and a fourpenny piece are thrown into the bowl, and all begin to eat, each dipping to the bottom of the bowl. He or she who brings up the ring will be the first married; whoever brings up the button will be an old maid or an old bachelor; and he or she who brings out the coin will become the richest. As may be imagined, this creates great fun.”
What’s served at Octavia is a more modern interpretation of posset ($11), using ingredients that would seem like incredible luxuries to a 15th century cook: refined sugar, lime juice, an icy raspberry granita and ripe golden peaches (which, sadly for them, didn’t migrate westward until the 17th century). While historical drinking possets use milk and have a grainier texture, using high-fat cream produces a smoother consistency — more of a gel.
It’s on the menu because of Hannah Ziskin, the consulting pastry chef for Perello’s restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles. A pastry specialist since 2010, she can’t recall seeing posset on any American restaurant menus before she started making it. In fact, the first one she ever tasted was one she made herself. “I wish I could say I read it in ‘Hamlet’ and said, I will make this,” she said. Instead, it was inspired by her time learning how to make cheese at San Francisco’s
Bar Tartine. Manipulating the process of curd separation and coagulation made her think about how to use those principles in pastry.
She was seeking a cold dessert when she stumbled across a breakdown of posset in the Guardian newspaper, written by Felicity Cloake in 2013. Many Europeanstyle American restaurants have some kind of panna cotta on the menu to fulfill that cold dessert niche, but Ziskin wasn’t a fan of how gelatin in the recipe made the dish inaccessible to people who don’t eat meat. And she wanted something more acidic than a panna cotta, yet lighter than a curd.
What results is a brain-breaking dessert that looks like creme fraîche but tastes like a Warhead. Its sour flavor made me shiver with delight, and it blew away any lingering sense of heaviness left from the savory courses that preceded it. Cool, tangy and almost weightless, it disappeared in a flash. There are no rings or old coins involved in this recipe, but it’s still great fun.