I Cooked the 1606 Drink That Drugged Macbeth's Guards

The Drink Lady Macbeth Used to Drug a King in 1606 In 1606, Lady Macbeth whispered that she had "drugged their possets" — and every London playgoer knew exactly what that meant. A posset was a real drink: hot milk curdled with sack wine, spiced, and sipped as both a bedtime cure and, apparently, a weapon. So I went back to the original 17th-century recipe books and recreated one — including Sir Kenelm Digby's lavish 1669 "My Lord of Carlisle's Sack-Posset," loaded with eighteen egg yolks, sack, Rhenish wine, cinnamon, mace, and a finish of ambergris and musk. We trace how this curdled-milk drink became a Tudor and Stuart cure-all for plague, fever, hangovers, and sleeplessness, why King Charles I was handed one by his physician in 1620, and how the three-layered posset was drunk through a special two-spouted posset pot. Then we cook it, pour it, and taste it — with an honest verdict on whether a cup of warm curdled milk could really put a king's guards to sleep. Along the way: the l