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Syllabub
Dissolve a generous teaspoon of sugar in a tablespoon of brandy. Put in a pint cup and milk into this from the cow till the foam reaches the top.
This is the oldest form of syllabub, and it depends entirely on milk taken straight from the udder into the cup. That single instruction is what puts it out of reach.
- Why it fails todayRaw milk drawn directly from the animal into a cup is never heated at any point in this recipe, and nothing in it will destroy Campylobacter, Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7, Listeria or Brucella. A tablespoon of brandy diluted into a pint of milk is far too little alcohol to have any antimicrobial effect.
- The intended reader makes it worseThe intended reader may make it worse -- if this recipe sits in an invalid cookery chapter, it was written for the sick, the elderly and the convalescent, exactly the group most likely to be seriously harmed by a milk-borne infection. Nothing in the recipe text itself indicates where it was placed. If you want a syllabub, use a current recipe built on pasteurised dairy.
- The effect cannot be reproducedThe effect cannot easily be reproduced -- the froth is not whipped in; it comes from milk at body temperature striking the sugar-and-brandy mixture under pressure from the teat. Cold bottled milk poured from a jug will not foam this way.
- "A pint cup"A vessel holding a pint, 16 fl oz if the measure is American, 20 if imperial; the recipe does not say which. It reads as a single serving.
- Brandy in invalid dietSpirits were widely treated as a stimulant and restorative in nineteenth-century sickroom cookery rather than as a flavouring, which may account for a single teaspoon of sugar being paired with a full tablespoon of brandy.
Syllabub is one of the long-lived dishes of English cookery, appearing in print from the sixteenth century onward and surviving in American books into the twentieth. The name is usually given as a compound of an old word for a sparkling wine and "bub", a slang term for a bubbling drink, though that etymology is traditional rather than settled. Early versions are generally described as just this: a sweetened cup of wine, cider or brandy set beneath a cow and filled with milk until it frothed, the acid and alcohol curdling the milk into a light drinkable curd under a head of foam. By the eighteenth century the fashionable form had become the whipped syllabub, cream beaten with wine, sugar and lemon and served in glasses, and the milked-from-the-cow original had retreated into two places: nostalgic country recipes and the invalid chapter, where its lightness and its dose of spirits recommended it to nurses.