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Syllabubs That Will Keep a Week or Ten Days
Put the grated rind and strained juice of three lemons upon a pound of powdered sugar. Add a pint and a half of good wine, and a quart of thick cream. A little brandy may be added or not. Whisk the mixture patiently one way till it is well frothed. As the froth rises, take it off gently, and pile it in glasses. Sprinkle some of the small confections called hundreds and thousands on the top, and keep the syllabubs in a cool place.
This is an "everlasting" or solid syllabub, the kind built by skimming froth off a wine-and-cream base rather than the older whipped-to-nothing sort. The success of it rests almost entirely on the fat content of the cream and the patience of the whisking.
- The hinge: skim, don't dumpThe mixture is not whipped solid. You whisk until a stable foam rises, lift that froth off with a skimmer or slotted spoon and pile it into glasses, then keep whisking the remaining liquid to raise more. Beating the whole lot to stiffness gives a curdled, weeping mess, because the acid and alcohol are working against the fat.
- CreamNothing under about 36% butterfat will hold. Use heavy or double cream, and avoid ultra-pasteurised cream, which foams poorly and collapses faster. A quart in a British book of this date is 40 fl oz, roughly 5 US cups.
- A pint and a half of wineAn imperial pint and a half is 30 fl oz, close to 3¾ US cups — slightly more than a standard 750 ml bottle. Sweet sherry, Madeira or a white wine with some body is traditional; a bone-dry modern white leaves the mixture thin and sour.
- Powdered sugarIn Victorian usage this means granulated sugar crushed fine, what would now be sold as caster or superfine sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will dull the flavour, though it dissolves readily enough if that is all you have.
- Hundreds and thousandsThe British name for the tiny coloured sugar spheres sold in the US as nonpareils. Any fine sprinkle works; the colours can bleed into damp cream, so adding them shortly before serving is safer, though the recipe as written sprinkles them before the syllabubs are put away.
- Whisking one wayDirection is unlikely to make any difference to the foam; the instruction is best read as calling for a slow, steady, unhurried action, which does matter: aggressive beating with an electric mixer overworks the fat and breaks the emulsion.
- "A cool place" and the keeping claimThe week to ten days assumed a cold larder and reflects the preservative effect of sugar, acid and alcohol on the froth. Refrigerate, and expect the syllabubs to hold their shape two to three days; after that they slowly separate, with a clear layer of lemon whey at the base of the glass.
- YieldAs written this fills a great many glasses, since only the froth is served and the exact number depends on how much froth the cream gives up. Quartering the quantities is sensible unless catering for a party.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English sweets, recorded from the sixteenth century, though the origin of the name is unknown. The earliest versions were drinks: cider or wine in a bowl, with milk squirted into it straight from the cow to raise a head, so that the finished thing was part liquid, part foam and drunk from a spouted glass. By the eighteenth century cooks had learned that a stiffer cream and careful skimming produced a froth that would stand for days, and these "everlasting" or "solid" syllabubs became a fixture of the dessert table, served in tall footed glasses alongside jellies and creams. Cassell's includes it in the late Victorian period as a survivor rather than a novelty — the hundreds and thousands on top are the nineteenth-century addition.