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Syllabubs in Glasses
Put a quarter of a pound of sugar into a small punch-bowl, and pour upon it the strained juice of a large fresh lemon. Stir the mixture briskly, and add a tumblerful of port, a tumblerful of sherry, and half a tumblerful of brandy. Add half a nutmeg, grated, place the bowl under the cow, and fill it till it froths high in the bowl. In serving put a little curd into each glass, fill it with whey, and place a spoonful of thick cream on the top.
This is a whipt or separated syllabub, in which acid and alcohol curdle warm milk into a light curd floating on spiced, fortified whey. Everything depends on the milk going in warm and aerated, which is what "under the cow" means.
- "Place the bowl under the cow"The instruction is literal: milk was drawn straight from the udder into the bowl so it arrived at about blood heat and full of air. The equivalent is whole milk warmed to roughly 100F and frothed hard with a whisk, milk frother or blender until it stands in foam. Use pasteurised milk — the wine and brandy do not sterilise anything.
- How much milkEnough to fill the bowl and froth above the rim, which for this quantity of wine means something in the region of 1.5 to 2 pints. The original gives no figure because the cook simply stopped when the foam rose.
- A tumblerfulA Victorian tumbler is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. As written the bowl takes about half a pint of port, half a pint of sherry and a quarter pint of brandy — still very strong, and worth halving the brandy if the syllabub is to be drunk rather than spooned.
- A quarter pound of sugarAbout 115 g, a generous half cup. It should be dissolved completely in the lemon juice before any wine goes in, or it will settle and the whey will taste thin at the top and syrupy at the bottom.
- Half a nutmegHalf a whole nutmeg grated comes to roughly one to one and a half teaspoons — assertive by modern taste. Rather less is plenty unless you want the spice to carry over the fortified wine.
- Standing timeThe recipe implies immediate service, but a separated syllabub is better left to stand three to four hours, or overnight in a cool place, so the curd firms and the whey below runs clear. Period households used tall syllabub glasses and spouted syllabub pots for exactly this.
- ServingCurd first, whey poured in around it, cream floated last with a spoon held against the glass. Do not stir — the point is the three layers.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English sweets, current from the sixteenth century onward and still fashionable enough in the nineteenth for cookery books of the period to print several versions. The name's origin is unsettled; it is often said to join "Sille," for the wine of Sillery in Champagne, with "bub," old slang for a bubbling drink, though this is folk etymology rather than documented fact. Two families of the dish existed side by side: the thick everlasting or whipped syllabub, essentially sweetened cream whisked with wine and served as a stable froth, and this older separated kind, in which the drink is a curd to be eaten with a spoon over a spiced alcoholic whey to be drunk beneath it. Milking directly into the bowl is described in period recipes and became a country-house entertainment, one of the reasons syllabub kept a rustic, faintly theatrical reputation long after households were buying their milk from a cart.