Make This Easy, Creamy Four-Ingredient Lemon Dessert.
If you saw “lemon curd cream” on your dessert list, you’d probably ditch it in favor of lava cake. It’s clear: “Sour” is an inherently non-sexual word. But while not all fermented milk products are desirable, in many cases fermented milk products are beneficial. The cheese is big. This sweet, creamy, lemony four-ingredient posset is another one.
Posset has always been there. Lady Macbeth even used poisoned possets to incapacitate the guards outside Duncan’s room, but the dessert looked a little different in Shakespeare’s time. Instead of a cold, creamy dessert, the original posset was a hot, spiced drink made from milk condensed with wine or ale.
The modern version is served chilled and sour with lemon juice, but the science is the same: milk and cream contain a protein called casein. This molecule has a negative charge that repels other casein molecules, allowing proteins to float without clumping. When you add an acidic ingredient like wine or lemon juice, you introduce positively charged protons (hydrogen ions) into the solution, neutralizing the negative charge of proteins and allowing them to accumulate and form curds.
And that’s really all it takes to create a posset. You boil some heavy cream with sugar, then add lemon juice and let it brew until tiny curds form, resulting in a tangy sweet dessert with a creme brulee-like texture. It’s delicious—almost like a key lime pie filling if the lime pie were flavored with lemon, or soft lemon pudding made without cornstarch, flour, eggs, gelatin, or any other thickeners.
There are many recipes for lemon posset – they’ve been perfecting it since Shakespeare, after all – but I based this recipe from Food52 as it was one of the more streamlined (lazy) recipes I found. Some posset recipes call for rubbing fruit or making syrup, and I didn’t want to do any of that.
However, I wanted to add some tangerine juice before the citrus season is fully over. So I used 1/4 cup lemon juice and 2 tablespoons tangerine juice rather than 5 tablespoons pure lemon juice as Food52 suggests. (Feel free to experiment with different citrus juices. You can even use limes.)
This recipe is easy to follow, but you must pay attention to the cream. It’s not uncommon for heavy cream to have clumps of milk fat floating around, and you’ll need to make sure you’re straining it out. If you leave it inside and heat it up with the rest of the cream, the fat will melt and then harden on the surface of your posset, forming a thin greasy film. It’s not the end of the world, but it will show. You should also keep an eye on the cream the entire time it boils, as dairy products can boil away quickly.
Other than that, the only thing you need to worry about is finishing your posset. Fresh raspberries pair well with lemon, but you can also add a scoop of raspberry jam, a dash of unsweetened whipped cream, or shortbread for dipping. You can even make brulee if you like, though you’ll need a burner (or a reliable roaster) to do this.
Posset with lemon and mandarin
Ingredients:
- 2 cups heavy cream
- 2/3 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
- 2 tablespoons freshly squeezed tangerine juice
Measure out the cream, making sure to remove any lumps of butterfat. Add the cream to a small saucepan with the sugar, then bring to a boil over medium heat, watching and stirring constantly to melt the sugar. Let simmer for five minutes, then remove from heat and stir in the juice.
Let the mixture cool for 15 minutes, then divide among four molds, teacups, or these little wine cellar glasses (which I did). Refrigerate for at least two hours and serve cold with any finishing touches you desire.