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Syllabubs, Simple
Take a pint of cream, and put to it the whites of three eggs well beaten, add the juice of one lemon, three spoonfuls of wine, grated lemon-peel, and sugar according to taste. Have the glasses ready with a little wine in each of them; whisk the cream, and as the froth rises fill the glasses.
A cold whisked syllabub, served and eaten without any cooking at all. The obstacle is the egg white.
- Raw egg whites, never heatedThe three whites are beaten in and go into the glass uncooked; nothing in the method brings them anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shell eggs of the period were a different risk picture from a modern retail supply chain, but the dish still has no kill step, and it is served to whoever is handed a glass, including the people least able to shrug off an infection. If you want a syllabub, use a current recipe written around pasteurised whites or none at all.
- It also sits at room temperatureThe instruction is to fill the glasses as the froth rises, and the recipe gives no chilling step; syllabubs of this type were commonly left to stand so the liquid could separate below the foam. A cream-and-egg-white foam left standing in a warm room is an unfavourable condition.
- The wine does not make it safeThree spoonfuls of wine in a pint of cream, plus a splash in each glass, gives an alcohol level far too low to have any preserving or sterilising effect. The lemon juice likewise does not acidify the mixture enough to matter.
- Imperial measuresFor reading the proportions: the pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, not the American 16. "Spoonful" is unspecified; in books of this period it is usually taken as a tablespoon, but the text does not say.
- What "wine" meantThe recipe does not specify. Syllabubs of this period were often made with sherry, Madeira or another sweet fortified wine, sometimes with brandy alongside, though white table wine and cider also appear in the tradition.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English sweets, recorded from the sixteenth century onwards, and in its earliest form depended on the acid of wine or cider curdling fresh cream into a soft, frothy curd above a clear liquid; the drink was traditionally said to have been made by milking the cow straight into the wine to get the froth. The name's origin is genuinely obscure, and the various explanations offered for the "sil" and "bub" elements are guesswork rather than documented etymology. By the time Cassell's was compiled the dish had drifted from a drink toward a whipped dessert, stabilised with beaten egg white and served in small glasses, which is why it appears among the simple sweets rather than the beverages. Its place in a Victorian household book reflects a kitchen with reliable access to raw cream and no refrigeration to speak of, conditions that shaped both the recipe and the speed with which it had to be eaten.