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London Syllabub
Put two ounces of loaf sugar with three-quarters of a pint of sherry or Madeira into a bowl, and grate half a small nutmeg into it. If practicable, milk into it from the cow a quart of milk; if not, procure the milk as new as possible, make it lukewarm, and pour it from a good height through a strainer upon the wine. Serve the syllabub frothed. Time, two or three minutes to warm the milk. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine, 8d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A whipped-froth drink that depends entirely on aeration: the milk must hit the wine hard enough to foam, and it must be served before that foam collapses. Everything else is measuring.
- Skip the cow, use pasteurised whole milkMilking straight into the bowl was the original point of the dish, but unpasteurised milk warmed to body temperature is a genuine risk for Listeria, Campylobacter and Salmonella. Use pasteurised whole milk; the fat helps carry the froth, so skimmed or plant milks are unlikely to work.
- Imperial volumesThree-quarters of an Imperial pint of wine is 15 fl oz, roughly 1¾ US cups — a little over half a standard 750 ml bottle. An Imperial quart of milk is 40 fl oz, about 5 US cups.
- Loaf sugarTwo ounces of loaf sugar means sugar broken or nipped from a hard refined cone: use about ¼ cup of ordinary granulated, or caster sugar if you want it to dissolve in the wine without stirring for long.
- Lukewarm means blood heatAim for 95–100F. Much hotter and the wine's acid is more likely to throw the milk into visible grains rather than a smooth froth; much colder and it will froth poorly.
- The pour is the recipeThe height and the strainer are not decoration — they are how air gets in. Pour in a thin stream from as great a height as you can manage above the bowl through a fine sieve, and keep pouring steadily rather than in stages. A milk frother or a whisk worked hard at the surface will do a similar job if your aim is poor.
- NutmegHalf a small nutmeg grated fresh is roughly ½ to 1 teaspoon. Pre-ground nutmeg is markedly flatter in flavour.
- Serve at onceThe syllabub will fairly soon separate into a curdy cap over thin whey. That separation was expected and even admired in older recipes, but the frothed stage is what is being served here.
- Yield and glassesAbout 1.6 litres of liquid before frothing, filling six or seven tall glasses or small punch cups. It is strong — a little over half a bottle of fortified wine across seven servings.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English party drinks, recorded from the sixteenth century onward; the name is usually explained as a compound of "sill" or "sille" (sometimes traced to a wine district) and "bub", old slang for a bubbling drink, though the etymology is traditional guesswork rather than settled fact. Early versions were made in the dairy or the orchard, the milkmaid squirting milk directly from the udder into a bowl of cider or wine so that the force of the jet did the whisking — hence the wistful "if practicable, milk into it from the cow" that survives in Cassell's long after most readers had no cow. By the Victorian period the drink had largely given way to the thicker "everlasting" or "whipt" syllabub made with cream, which held its shape in a glass and could be handed round at a supper table; the thin frothed London version printed here belongs to the older tradition, and its inclusion is as much antiquarian as practical. The sherry or Madeira points to the same fortified wines that dominated English middle-class cellars in the nineteenth century, and the costing "exclusive of the wine" quietly admits that the wine was the expensive part.