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Solid Syllabub
Rub five or six lumps of sugar upon the rind of two large fresh lemons till the yellow part is taken off, then add a little more sugar to make up the weight to half a pound. Crush this to powder, put it into a bowl, and strain upon it the juice of the lemons. Add a pint of sherry or raisin wine, and a pint of double cream, that is, cream that has stood for twenty-four hours. Whisk the mixture till it is a solid froth, and lay it on a muslin sieve. Leave it for twelve hours, then serve in glasses. Time to froth the syllabub, an hour or more. Probable cost, 3s. 6d.
A drained, self-supporting syllabub of the kind Victorian books call "solid" or "everlasting", to distinguish it from the drinking sort that separates in the glass. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the instructions were written for a hand whisk and an unrefrigerated dairy.
- Rubbing the sugar on the rindThis is the whole flavour of the dish. Dragging a hard lump of loaf sugar over the lemon skin ruptures the oil cells and the sugar absorbs the oil. Sugar cubes still work; failing that, grate the zest finely and rub it into caster sugar with your fingers.
- Half a pound of sugarThat is 8 oz, roughly 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of caster sugar, for a total mixture of about two pints. It reads as a great deal, but sugar is doing structural work here as well as sweetening, and a sharply reduced quantity will give a looser froth.
- PintsImperial pints of 20 fl oz. Two US cups of wine and two of cream will get you close; 600 ml of each is closer still.
- "Double cream, that is, cream that has stood for twenty-four hours"Cassell's means cream that has risen and thickened on standing milk, not a cream you buy. British double cream (about 48% fat) is the direct equivalent; in the US use heavy cream, and note that a cream at 36% will drain thin and may never hold. Ultra-pasteurised cream whips reluctantly and is worth avoiding.
- Raisin wineA homemade sweet fruit wine rarely found for sale today. A cream sherry, Madeira or Marsala stands in for it; the recipe's own first suggestion of sherry is the simplest route.
- "An hour or more" of whiskingThat is a hand whisk in a cold larder. With an electric mixer on medium you want five to ten minutes, and you must stop the moment the mixture holds a soft, thick froth. The acid and alcohol destabilise the cream, and over-beating tips it straight to grainy curds.
- The muslin sieveThe point of the twelve-hour drain is that the thin, watery whey runs off and leaves a froth stiff enough to stand in a glass. Line a sieve with damp muslin or a coffee filter, set it over a bowl, and refrigerate — a Victorian larder was cool, a modern kitchen is not.
- YieldAbout eight small glasses. Serve in something narrow and stemmed; the dessert is very rich and a large portion defeats it.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English sweets, recorded from the sixteenth century, and its early form was a curdled drink rather than a dessert: sweetened wine or cider in a bowl, with milk poured in from a height, or — in the version often repeated in period sources — milked into it straight from the cow, so the force of the stream did the frothing. Those syllabubs separated in the glass into a foam above and a spiced liquor below, and were drunk. By the eighteenth century cooks had learned to whip cream with wine and lemon into a froth stiff enough to eat with a spoon, and to drain off the whey through muslin to make it keep; these are the "solid", "everlasting" or "whipt" syllabubs, and a good one would hold for several days. Cassell's is recording a long-established dish, and by the 1870s a somewhat old-fashioned one — the price, 3s. 6d., tells its own story: cream and a pint of sherry made this a distinctly expensive way to end a dinner.