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Syllabubs Under the Cow
Take a large china bowl--punch bowl is the most suitable for the purpose--put into it half a pound of lump sugar, the strained juice of a lemon, a pint of sherry, a glassful of brandy, and three-quarters of a pint of cream beaten up with white of egg. Stir the mixture briskly for a minute or two, and put a dozen ratafias into it. Take it to the dairymaid, and let her milk the cow into the bowl until it is quite full. Put it away, and let it remain untouched till the following day. Grate a little nutmeg on the top, and serve.
This is a genuine period recipe, but its central instruction — milk a cow directly into the bowl, then let the whole thing stand a full day before eating — puts it outside what can be made safely now. The notes below explain the terms and the specific problems.
- Raw milk, straight from the udderMilk drawn directly into the bowl is unpasteurised and warm, around blood heat. Raw milk is a documented vehicle for Campylobacter, Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli, Salmonella and Listeria; nothing in this recipe heats it, and nothing filters it.
- Held overnight, unrefrigeratedThe dish is deliberately set aside "till the following day" in a Victorian larder. A warm dairy mixture left standing for hours is a growth medium, and the finished syllabub is eaten cold and uncooked. Alcohol at this dilution does not sterilise it.
- Raw egg whiteThe cream is beaten up with uncooked white of egg and never cooked afterwards. That is a further Salmonella route in a dish already left standing a day without refrigeration.
- If you want a syllabubUse a current recipe for a whipped or everlasting syllabub made with pasteurised cream and kept chilled. The froth is the point of the dish, and it can be had without the cow.
- RatafiasSmall, hard, almond-flavoured macaroons, roughly the size of a coin, used as a soaked base at the bottom of trifles and syllabubs. Amaretti are the closest thing on sale now.
- Lump sugarSugar broken from a cone or loaf, not modern cubes of a fixed size. Half a pound is about 225 g by weight, which is what the recipe intends.
- A glassful of brandyAn unfixed measure in Victorian books, generally taken as a wineglassful, which is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though period usage varied. The original gives no way to narrow it further.
Syllabub "under the cow" is the most theatrical form of a drink that had been in English books since the sixteenth century, and is often said to be the oldest: sweetened wine or cider in a bowl, into which milk was jetted from a height so that the acid curdled it and the force raised a froth. Doing it literally under the cow was a conceit of the dairy house o great English estates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the milking of a few tame cows was part of the entertainment. By the time Cassell's compiled this dictionary in the 1870s the version most commonly printed was the whipped or "everlasting" syllabub, beaten with a whisk and set in glasses; the under-the-cow method survives in books like this one as a piece of inherited charm rather than a working instruction. The name's origin is unsettled, though it is often traced to "sillery", a Champagne wine, plus "bub", old slang for a bubbling drink — a folk etymology that should be treated as traditional rather than established.