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Syllabub
Mix with one quart of very sweet cream one-half pound of fine white sugar; put it aside a few minutes, then add six wineglasses of best Madeira or sherry wine; whip to a stiff froth with an egg beater. Serve in glasses.
A whipped syllabub is little more than sweetened cream aerated with fortified wine, and it stands or falls on the cream. The one thing to get right is the order of addition: sugar and wine dumped into thin, cold cream will loosen it and it will never take air.
- WineglassesA wineglass in American cookbooks of this period is about 2 fluid ounces, so six is roughly 1 1/2 cups of wine to 1 quart of cream. That is a generous proportion by modern taste; 3/4 to 1 cup gives a froth that holds better.
- Half a pound of sugarAround 1 1/8 cups of granulated sugar. "Fine white sugar" probably points to a well-refined sugar rather than a lump to be crushed; superfine or caster dissolves fastest and is a safe modern match.
- The creamUse heavy cream at 36 percent fat or better. Ultra-pasteurized cream whips slowly and collapses quickly, which matters here because the wine is already working against the foam.
- Order of workWhip the cream with the sugar to soft peaks first, then trickle the wine in while beating. Alcohol and acid destabilize a foam, so adding it at the start, as written, makes stiff froth much harder to reach.
- Egg beaterA rotary hand beater. A stand mixer on medium or a hand mixer works; go slower than you would for plain whipped cream and stop the moment it holds a peak, or the fat will break and grain.
- Madeira or sherryA medium or rich style — Bual or Malmsey Madeira, an oloroso or cream sherry — matches the sweetness the recipe expects. Dry fino reads thin against this much sugar.
- Separation is normalA whipped syllabub will tend to settle into a foam over a thin boozy layer within an hour or two. Serve it in stemmed glasses shortly after beating, well chilled, and treat the layering as part of the dish rather than a fault.
- YieldA quart of cream whipped with wine makes a large quantity of froth; expect at least eight to ten glasses, and more if the glasses are small.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English sweets, recorded from the sixteenth century onward, and originally it was not whipped at all: wine or cider was put in a bowl and milk was squirted or poured into it from a height, so that the acid curdled the milk into a soft curd floating on a clear whey. Spouted syllabub glasses were made to let a drinker sip the whey from below while eating the froth on top. The "whipt" version given here, in which cream is beaten with sugar and fortified wine into a froth, became the fashionable form in the eighteenth century.