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Birthday Syllabub
Take of port and sherry each a pint, mix them with half a pint of brandy and nutmeg grated; squeeze and strain the juice of two lemons into a large bowl and over half a pound of loaf sugar well broken into small pieces; stir the wine mixture into the bowl with the lemon-juice and sugar, and add new milk to it, or, if possible, milk the cow into it. This quantity of wine, etc., is sufficient for two quarts of milk. Probable cost, about 1s. 3d., without the wine and brandy.
A frothed "syllabub under the cow" of the older sort — an alcoholic punch that the milk sets into a curd-and-foam drink rather than a whipped dessert. It is easy to make and easy to over-pour.
- Scale and yieldA pint of port, a pint of sherry, half a pint of brandy and two quarts of milk is roughly three and a quarter quarts of finished syllabub — twenty to twenty-five small glasses. Imperial pints are 20 fl oz, so the two pints of wine alone are about five US cups; halve or quarter the whole thing unless you are feeding a party.
- StrengthTwo and a half pints of fortified wine and spirit to two quarts of milk gives a drink around 8-9 per cent alcohol, drunk cold and sweet and tasting of very little. Serve in punch cups, not tumblers.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a solid cone and chipped off as needed; half a pound is about 1 cup of ordinary granulated sugar. Broken small so it dissolves in the lemon juice — give it a few minutes and stir before the wine goes in.
- "Milk the cow into it"The point is the force and warmth of the stream, which aerates the wine and throws up the froth. Failing a cow, use whole milk at room temperature and pour it from a height into the bowl, or send it through a milk frother; cold milk from the refrigerator gives a thin, flat result.
- Raw milkThe instruction is literal — this was made with unpasteurised milk warm from the udder. Use pasteurised whole milk instead. Nothing here is ever heated, so the drink offers no protection against what raw milk can carry.
- New milk"New" milk means fresh and unskimmed, with the cream still in it. Whole milk works; single cream or a half-and-half split of milk and cream gives a richer curd, which is closer to what a Victorian dairy would have produced.
- What it should look likeThe acid and alcohol curdle the milk on purpose. Within an hour it separates into a clear amber whey below and a pale foam above, and it is meant to be drunk that way — the froth spooned or sipped off the top. Do not stir it back together.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the wine before the milk goes in; the quantity is left to the cook, and a whole nutmeg grated into this volume is not too much.
- TimingMake it no more than two or three hours ahead and keep it cold. Left overnight the foam collapses entirely and the curd goes grainy.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English party drinks, appearing in recipe books from the sixteenth century onward and originally closer to a beverage than a pudding: wine or cider in a bowl, milk driven into it hard enough to raise a head of foam, the acid setting a soft curd that floated on the liquor beneath. The name's origin is unsettled — it is often said to combine "Sille", for wine from the Champagne district of Sillery, with "bub", old slang for a bubbling drink, but this is folk etymology rather than documented fact. The direction to milk the cow straight into the bowl gave the style its usual name, syllabub "under the cow", and it was as much entertainment as technique at a dairy or a garden party. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century the fashion had largely moved to the thick whipped "everlasting" syllabub served in glasses as a dessert, so this entry preserves the older, wetter form — and its costing, 1s 3d for everything but the wine and brandy, quietly admits that the expensive part was the drink.