Home › The Principles of Cookery › Syllabubs, Solid
Syllabubs, Solid
Take one quart of cream, one quart of white wine, the juice of two lemons, the grated peel of a lemon, and sugar to taste. Mix these ingredients, mill them to a froth, then take off the scum as it rises, and place it to drain on a hair sieve. Half fill the glasses with the scum, and heap the froth on it.
A solid syllabub is a whipped, acidulated cream stabilised by wine and lemon juice rather than by cooking. The hinge is the fat content of the cream and the patience of the milling: too thin a cream, or too vigorous a whisk, and you get grainy curds instead of a standing froth.
- Use heavy creamFor this dish the cream needs to be rich; in modern terms heavy or double cream, around 36% fat or more. Anything labelled light or whipping cream below that will thin out under the acid and refuse to hold a froth.
- Quart for quart is a lotA quart of cream and a quart of wine make a very large quantity, enough froth for a great many small glasses. Scaling to a cup of each, the juice of half a lemon, and 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar keeps the same proportions and gives four to six servings.
- "Mill them to a froth"A syllabub mill was a wooden whisk or perforated plunger worked up and down in the bowl to drag air in. A large balloon whisk by hand is the closest equivalent; a stand mixer on medium-low also works, but stop the moment the surface stops absorbing air.
- Skim, do not whip stiffThe froth is meant to be lifted off in successive skimmings as it forms, over perhaps half an hour, while the liquid below stays loose. Whipping the whole bowl to a uniform stiff peak is a different dessert.
- The hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, the standard fine sieve before wire mesh. Use a fine nylon sieve or a colander lined with cheesecloth, set over a bowl, and let the skimmed froth drain in a cool place for at least an hour.
- An ambiguous instruction"Half fill the glasses with the scum, and heap the froth on it" reads oddly, since scum and froth appear to be the same substance here. One reading is that a little of the drained wine-and-lemon liquid goes in the bottom of each glass, with the drained froth heaped above it.
- Choose the wine carefullyA dry white — Riesling, Muscadet, or a Spanish white — keeps it from cloying, since the sugar is added separately. Sweet sherry or Madeira was equally traditional and gives a richer, older-tasting result; adjust the sugar down if you use one.
- Timing and storageAssemble within a few hours of serving and keep refrigerated. A solid syllabub will hold its shape overnight but slowly weeps wine into the glass.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English sweets, recorded from the sixteenth century onward, and the name's origin is genuinely unknown despite a long tradition of connecting it to "Sillery" wine and "bub" as slang for a drink. Early versions were drinks rather than desserts: wine or cider was put in a bowl and milk squirted into it straight from the cow, or poured from a height, so that the acid curdled the milk and the curd rose as a foam over the clear liquid below. The "whipt" and "solid" versions that fill nineteenth-century books are the domesticated descendants, made with bought cream and a whisk, and served in the tall footed syllabub glasses that survive in quantity from the eighteenth century he froth sat above and the wine showed through beneath.