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Syllabubs, Common
Put four ounces of pounded sugar into a bowl, and add the rind of a lemon, a grated nutmeg, half a pint of sweet wine, and half a pint of sherry. Mix all thoroughly till the sugar is dissolved. Pour in with a tea-pot or spouted jug held at a good height a pint and a half of warm milk. Serve the syllabub cold. A little pounded cinnamon and clotted cream may be laid on the top. Sometimes cider is used instead of wine, and then a little brandy should certainly be added.
A syllabub of the older, drinkable kind: sweetened wine curdled into a soft froth by milk poured in from a height. The whole thing hinges on temperature and on the pour.
- The hinge: blood-warm milk, poured highThe recipe says only "warm" milk; blood-warm, around body temperature, is the usual traditional reading, and it should fall from a height so that it aerates as it hits the acid wine. Milk that is very hot, or dribbled in gently, is more likely to give grainy curds than a stable froth over clear whey.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint of each wine is a little over 1 US cup, and a pint and a half of milk is about 3 1/2 US cups. Four ounces of sugar is weight, a generous 1/2 cup of caster sugar.
- "Sweet wine"Read this as a dessert wine: Madeira, sweet Marsala, cream sherry or Muscat. The recipe does not say whether the sherry is dry or sweet; between them the wines give the sugar and the acidity the milk needs to break cleanly.
- Lemon rindPare it in wide strips with no white pith and let it steep while the sugar dissolves; the recipe does not say when to remove it, but lifting it out before pouring the milk is simplest. Grated zest will tend to leave specks in the froth.
- NutmegOne whole nutmeg grated is a great deal by modern taste; half is nearer what most people want, and it should be grated fresh rather than taken from a tin.
- MilkWhole milk, and the creamier the better. Skimmed or ultra-pasteurised milk froths poorly and separates thinly.
- Serve coldPour into glasses and chill so the layers separate: froth on top, spiced whey beneath. Best drunk the same day.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, or eight to ten small stemmed glasses. Serve with a spoon as well as a straw, since the top is eaten and the bottom drunk.
- The cider versionCider is weaker than fortified wine, which is presumably why the recipe insists that brandy "should certainly be added"; the curdling itself is mostly the work of the acid. Use a dry still cider rather than a sweet sparkling one.
Syllabub belongs to a long English line of drinks made by curdling wine or cider with milk, recorded from the sixteenth century onward and at its height in the seventeenth and eighteenth. Earlier instructions often called for the cow to be milked straight into the bowl of spiced wine, which is exactly what the pouring from a height with a spouted jug imitates: the thin, forceful stream and the warmth of fresh milk. The name's origin is unsettled, though it is often traced to a supposed compound of Sillery, a Champagne wine, and "bub" for a bubbling drink; that explanation is traditional rather than documented. By the time Cassell's appeared, the drinkable syllabub described here was the older, plainer form, and the fashionable version was the "everlasting" or whipped syllabub, cream beaten stiff with wine and lemon and piled into glasses to be eaten with a spoon. Calling this one "common" marks it as the survival of an earlier dairy tradition rather than a modern dessert.