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Red Wine Custard
Mix together in a bowl half a pint of good thick cream, half a pound of white sugar, the juice of three lemons and the grated peel of one, with half a pint of red wine. Let it all remain covered for twelve hours; then beat it well with a whisk till it froths; let it stand a quarter of an hour longer that the froth may be firm, take it off with a slice, and put it into cups or a deep dish. To be eaten with fancy biscuits.
Despite the name there is no egg and no cooking here: this is a whipped syllabub, in which acid and alcohol thicken sweetened cream while a whisk does the rest. A few of the old quantities and habits need translating.
- The hinge: stop whisking earlyThe mixture goes from soft froth to grainy, separated butterfat in a matter of seconds once it thickens. Whisk only until it holds a soft peak on the wires, then stop; the fifteen minutes of standing firms it further without any more beating.
- Half a pintCassell's pints are imperial, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups or 285 ml, for both the cream and the wine. Half a pound of sugar is 225 g, roughly 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated.
- CreamUse heavy or double cream at 36 per cent butterfat or above; anything lighter will not carry that much liquid. Avoid ultra-pasteurised cream if you can, as it whips to a looser, less stable froth.
- The twelve-hour steepingThe original assumes a cold larder. Cover and infuse in the refrigerator, and keep the finished dish chilled — raw cream held at room temperature for half a day is not something to repeat.
- Which red wineA soft, fruity wine works best; heavily tannic reds turn the cream astringent and dull the colour to grey-pink. Some period syllabub recipes call for port or a sweetened wine, which is worth remembering if your result tastes thin.
- Taking it off with a sliceA "slice" is a flat skimmer or palette knife. The froth is lifted off the top, leaving a thin wine whey beneath — that liquor was traditionally poured into the bottom of the glasses so the drinker got both layers.
- Yield and servingProbably enough for about six small glasses or custard cups. "Fancy biscuits" means crisp sweet ones — sponge fingers, langues de chat, shortbread — not anything soft.
This is a syllabub under another name. The dish belongs to a family of English creams, popular from the seventeenth century onward (the name itself is attested earlier still), in which wine or cider is beaten into sweetened cream until the acid and alcohol set it into a foam; the older "whipt" and "everlasting" syllabubs were made in exactly this way, with the froth skimmed off and left to stand so it would keep for a day or two rather than collapsing in an hour. The name syllabub itself is of uncertain origin, often said to combine a wine name with "bub", an old cant word for a bubbling drink, though the etymology is not settled. By the Victorian period the older version — milked or squirted directly into the wine to raise a head — had largely given way to the whisked, spoonable dessert seen here, a cold sweet that required nothing but a bowl, a whisk and patience.