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Lemon Syllabub
Strain the juice of five lemons over the rind of two. Add half a pound of loaf sugar, and let it remain for an hour or two. Add a pint of thick cream and half a pint of sherry or raisin wine, strain it, then whisk until the mixture is well frothed. Pour the syllabub into glasses, and let it stand ten or twelve hours before being served. Time, thirty or forty minutes to whisk the syllabub. Probable cost, exclusive of the sherry, 2s. 3d. Sufficient for a dozen glasses.
A cold, boozy whipped cream set with lemon and wine — what Victorian cooks called an "everlasting" or solid syllabub, as opposed to the frothy drinking kind. Most of the work is in the resting, not the whisking.
- Stop whisking at soft peaksAcid and alcohol thicken cream fast, so the mixture stiffens sooner than plain cream would. Thirty or forty minutes refers to whisking by hand; with a stand mixer on medium you will get there far sooner, so watch it. Push past soft, holding peaks and it can break into sweet lemon butter.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in a hard cone, chipped and crushed for use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; half a pound is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons. Let it dissolve fully in the juice during the one to two hour steeping or the syllabub will be gritty.
- Imperial pintsA British pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 2½ cups of cream and 1¼ cups of wine — a high ratio of liquid to cream, which is what produces the clear whey layer underneath.
- Thick creamThe nearest modern equivalent is British double cream, about 48 per cent butterfat. Heavy or whipping cream at around 36 per cent will work but gives a looser, more quickly collapsing froth.
- Raisin wineA homemade sweet wine fermented from dried raisins, common in Victorian pantries and effectively unobtainable now. A cream or oloroso sherry, Madeira, or a sweet white wine stands in for it.
- Strain before whisking, not afterThe instruction reads oddly because the peel of two lemons has been sitting in the juice for hours. Lift out the rind and any pips before the cream goes anywhere near a whisk.
- The long stand is deliberateTen to twelve hours in a cool place lets the syllabub set and firm; a layer of lemony whey may settle beneath the foam. Serve in small stemmed glasses with a long spoon.
- YieldA dozen small glasses, roughly 4 fl oz each. It is very rich, so the small portion is correct. The cream is uncooked, so keep it refrigerated and eat within a day or two.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English sweets, recorded from the sixteenth century onward, and it began life as a drink rather than a spoon dish: sweetened wine or cider in a bowl, with warm milk poured or squirted into it from a height to raise a froth. The name's origin is uncertain, though it is often traced to "sille", said to be a wine from the Champagne district, joined to "bub" as an old slang term for a bubbling drink -- an explanation traditional rather than documented. By the eighteenth century cooks had split the dish in two: the whipt syllabub, drunk from a spouted glass with the curd eaten off the top, and the "everlasting" or solid version like this one, whisked stiff enough to keep its shape for a day or more. The careful note of cost -- 2s 3d, sherry excluded -- is typical of a book that expected its readers to keep household accounts.