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Devonshire Syllabub
In the country where milk is to be had pure and direct from its source, syllabubs are to be seen on every table varied with the delicious far-famed Devonshire junket. The quantity of wine intended to be used for the syllabub is first put into a large China bowl with sugar to taste. It is then milked on till the bowl is full, and afterwards when cold, it is covered with clotted cream. A little grated nutmeg, or pounded cinnamon (or both may be used) is sprinkled over the top when served. A pint of port and one of sherry will make a large and excellent syllabub.
A whipped-in-the-bowl syllabub of the old type, and the instruction that gives it its character — milking the cow straight into the wine — is also the reason it cannot be reproduced today.
- Why it fails now"Milked on till the bowl is full" means warm, unpasteurised milk delivered directly from the udder into the bowl, and the milk is never heated at any stage. Raw milk carries a real risk of Campylobacter, Shiga-toxin E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria and, historically, Brucella; the alcohol in the wine does not sterilise it. Use a current syllabub recipe instead.
- The point of the milkingThe froth is mechanical rather than whipped: a jet of warm milk falling from a height into the acid wine aerates and curdles it at the same time, giving a soft curd under a foam. The book's opening remark about milk "pure and direct from its source" points the same way — chilled bottled milk poured from a jug does not behave in the same manner.
- The wine measureA pint of port and a pint of sherry is an imperial pint each, 20 fl oz, so 40 fl oz of fortified wine before any milk goes in. The recipe calls the result "a large" syllabub; it is a bowl for a table, not a dessert for four, though no yield is stated.
- Sugar to tasteNo quantity is given; the recipe leaves it to the cook. Port and the sherries shipped to Britain in this period were generally sweeter than much of what is sold under those names now, so a modern dry oloroso would likely need more sugar to balance the acidity that sets the curd.
- Clotted creamDevonshire clotted cream is scalded cream, held at low heat until a thick crust forms, then cooled and lifted off. It is not whipped cream and will not fold in; it sits on the surface as a separate layer, which is what the recipe intends.
- JunketThe junket mentioned alongside is a separate dish — milk set with rennet and eaten with cream and sugar. It is named here as the other thing a Devon dairy did with very fresh milk, not as an ingredient.
Syllabub was one of the long-lived dishes of English cookery, recorded from the sixteenth century onward and surviving into the Victorian period in two forms: the "everlasting" or whipped syllabub, beaten stiff with cream and lemon and set aside to stand for days, and this older "syllabub under the cow", in which the milk was drawn directly into the sweetened wine. The second kind belonged to dairy counties, and the entry frames it as a country pleasure the town cook simply cannot have — it is as much about the quality of West Country milk as about the recipe. The word's origin is unsettled; it is often traced to a combination of a wine name and the dialect word bub for a bubbling drink, but that is a traditional explanation rather than a documented one.