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Housewife's Cream
Rub the yellow part of a fresh lemon upon three ounces of loaf sugar; reduce the sugar to powder, and stir it until dissolved into half a pint of thick cream. Add the strained lemon-juice and a quarter of a pint of sherry, and whisk all well together until thick. Serve in custard-glasses, which should be kept in a cool place until wanted. This cream is better if made a few hours before it is used. Just before serving, dust a little powdered cinnamon or pink sugar over the top. Time, one hour to prepare. Probable cost, exclusive of the sherry, 10d. Sufficient for four glasses.
A whisked syllabub under a plainer name. It is quick work once the sugar has taken up the lemon oil, and the only real difficulty is keeping the mixture from separating.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint of cream is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups; the quarter pint of sherry is 5 fl oz. Three ounces of sugar is roughly 6 to 7 tablespoons.
- Loaf sugarSold as a hard cone or block of refined sugar, to be broken and crushed at home. Granulated or caster sugar does the same job; the recipe only wants it hard enough to abrade the lemon skin.
- Rubbing the lemonThis is the hinge. Dragging the sugar over the zest draws out the oil and gives a perfume that grated zest alone will not — the same principle as an oleo-saccharum in punch-making. Let the sugar sit a few minutes before crushing it so the oil soaks in.
- CreamUse double or heavy cream, 36% fat or above. Single cream and most half-and-half will not thicken once acid and wine go in.
- Adding acid and winePour the lemon juice and sherry in slowly, whisking as you go. Dumped in at once they shock the cream and it curdles rather than thickens.
- WhiskingStop at soft, floppy peaks that just hold a trail. The mixture is loose and pourable at first and then firms quickly; carried too far it breaks into grainy butter and whey.
- The hour, and the restingThe stated hour is preparation, not cooking — much of it is rubbing and crushing sugar. The instruction to make it a few hours ahead is sound: the acid continues to set the cream, and it holds better after a spell in the fridge.
- SherryA medium or cream sherry suits the sweetness. A dry fino gives a sharper, cleaner result.
- Pink sugarVictorian coloured sugar, often tinted with cochineal. Any coloured sanding sugar stands in, or use the cinnamon.
- YieldFour small glasses, as stated. These are custard glasses of a few ounces each, not modern dessert bowls.
This is a syllabub with the name filed off. The whisked or "everlasting" syllabub — cream thickened by wine and citrus acid rather than by cooking or gelatine — was an English party dish from the seventeenth century onwards, and was often made by frothing cream over sweetened wine and letting the curd rise above a clear layer to be drunk from a spouted glass. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s the dish had settled into this tidier form: everything whisked together, spooned into small glasses, and dusted with cinnamon or coloured sugar. The costing is characteristic of the book, which priced dishes for a household kept on accounts — tenpence for four glasses, with the sherry left off the bill.