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Windsor Syllabub
Put a pint of sherry into a china bowl, sweeten it, and flavour with grated nutmeg. Pour upon it a pint and a half of milk, stir briskly, and serve the syllabub frothed.
A two-ingredient drink that lives or dies on how the milk meets the wine. Everything here is about temperature, aeration and proportion.
- The hinge: froth, not curdsThe acid and alcohol in the sherry can curdle the milk into a grainy mess rather than a foam. The usual method was to send the milk in from a height in a thin stream, or to whisk hard while pouring, so that air is beaten in and the curd sets as a soft foam rather than lumps.
- Warm milk was assumedWarm milk may have been assumed -- some earlier syllabub recipes call for milk fresh from the cow, which would be near body temperature, though this recipe says nothing about it. Chilled milk poured straight from the fridge froths poorly; letting it come to room temperature, or warming it to blood heat, is likely to get closer to the intended result.
- Whole milk, or betterVictorian milk was unhomogenised and considerably richer than modern semi-skimmed. Use whole milk, and a splash of single cream in place of some of it if you want the head to hold longer than a few minutes.
- SweeteningNo quantity is given. Around 2 to 3 oz (60-85 g) of caster sugar per pint of sherry suits most palates; dissolve it in the wine before the milk goes in, since it will not dissolve in a foam.
- Which sherryA pint is 20 fl oz in this British book, roughly 570 ml. A medium or cream sherry gives the intended sweet, nutty character; a bone-dry fino makes something sharp and thin, and would need more sugar.
- Yield and servingAbout 2.5 pints of liquid, enough for eight to ten small glasses. Serve immediately in stemmed glasses while the froth stands, with a spoon: this is a drink at the bottom and something closer to a dessert on top. Grate the nutmeg fresh.
- It is strongOne pint of sherry in two and a half pints of liquid works out at roughly 7 to 8 per cent alcohol, about the strength of a light wine, so treat each glass as a drink rather than a dessert accompaniment.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English sweets, recorded from the sixteenth century onward, and in its earliest form it was made by milking a cow directly into a bowl of cider or wine, the force of the stream doing the whisking. The name is of uncertain origin; it is often said to combine "sille," a supposed old name for a Champagne-region wine, with "bub" as slang for a bubbling drink, though this etymology is traditional rather than settled. Over the centuries the dish split into two lines: the thin "whipt" or drinking syllabub of this recipe, poured into glasses and drunk through its own froth, and the stiffer "everlasting" syllabub of cream, wine and lemon whipped to hold for days. The Windsor name attaches sherry and nutmeg to a court association, though how the label came to be applied is unclear.