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Somersetshire Syllabub
Put a pint of port and a pint of sherry into a large china bowl, together with six ounces of powdered sugar and half a grated nutmeg. Milk into the bowl until it is full, or, if preferred, milk into another vessel. Strain the milk, and while it is still warm pour it from a good height upon the wine. In twenty minutes cover it with clotted cream, and garnish with nonpareil comfits. A true Somersetshire syllabub can be prepared only with milk warm and fresh from the cow. Sufficient for a large syllabub.
The instructions are clear enough, but the defining ingredient — milk drawn straight from the udder and never heated — is the reason this cannot be reproduced as written. The notes below explain the terms and the specific hazard.
- Why it fails: unpasteurised warm milkThe recipe insists on milk "warm and fresh from the cow" and the whole method depends on it: unheated milk poured from a height onto acidic wine is what produces the curd. Raw milk held at body temperature is a growth medium for Campylobacter, E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella and Listeria, and nothing in this recipe ever brings it to a safe temperature.
- The wine does not make it safeA pint of port and a pint of sherry topped up with a bowlful of milk gives a final alcohol content of well under ten per cent, and it is diluted further as the bowl fills. That is far below any level that would inactivate pathogens, and the twenty-minute stand at room temperature works the other way. If you want a syllabub, use a current recipe built on pasteurised cream.
- Vessel and volume"Milk into the bowl until it is full" means the bowl sets the yield, not the recipe. With two pints of wine as the base a large bowl is implied, but the recipe gives no measure of yield beyond "sufficient for a large syllabub".
- Powdered sugarIn Victorian and Edwardian British usage this is finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornflour-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name in the United States. Caster sugar is the modern equivalent.
- Nonpareil comfitsThe tiny hard sugar pellets still sold as nonpareils or hundreds-and-thousands. They were a standard garnish for sweet dishes long before they became a cake decoration.
- Clotted creamGenuine clotted cream is scalded and crusted, which is why it sits on top as a lid rather than sinking. Tinned or jarred clotted cream is the nearest ready substitute; whipped double cream behaves quite differently on the surface.
- Half a grated nutmegRoughly a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg from a whole seed. Pre-ground nutmeg is markedly weaker and would need more to register against two pints of fortified wine.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English sweets, recorded from the sixteenth century onward, and the early versions are largely of this type: wine or cider in a bowl, milk poured onto it from a height so the acid curdles the milk into a soft froth over a thin liquid beneath. The word's origin is unsettled — it is often linked to "bub" as an old cant term for a bubbling drink, with the first element variously explained, none of it documented. The dairying counties of the West Country claimed the milk-warm-from-the-cow version, and Somerset's association with clotted cream, shared with Devon and Cornwall, explains the topping here; some households kept a special spouted syllabub pot, and the practice of milking directly into the bowl is described in period sources — this recipe itself directs it. By the time this entry was compiled, the older frothy "whipt" syllabub had largely given way to thicker cream-and-wine versions set in glasses, so the milk-fresh recipe reads as a regional survival rather than everyday practice.