Syllabub
Half a pound sugar, three pints lukewarm cream, one cupful wine. Dissolve the sugar in the wine, then pour it on the milk from a height and slowly, so as to cause the milk to froth.--Mrs. E.
A two-ingredient drink that lives or dies on how the liquids meet. Everything here depends on the pour.
- The measurementsHalf a pound of sugar is about 1 1/8 cups granulated; three pints is 6 cups. "One cupful" of wine is probably somewhere near 8 ounces, but cup measures were not yet standardised, so treat it as approximate.
- Cream or milkThe recipe calls for cream in the ingredient line and then says "pour it on the milk," so the writer was not using the two words strictly. Cream gives the thicker, longer-lasting froth; whole milk froths more easily but collapses faster.
- Lukewarm matters"Lukewarm" here is roughly body temperature, somewhere around 95-100F, which is also the warmth of milk straight from the cow that this pour is imitating.
- The wineThe recipe says only "wine." A fortified or sweet wine -- Madeira, sherry or a sweet white -- is the likely intent; Madeira and sherry were common in Virginia households of the period. A dry table wine would give a thinner, sharper drink.
- The pour is the whole techniqueDissolve the sugar completely in the wine first, then pour that syrup into the dairy in a thin stream from as high as your arm reaches, into a wide bowl or pitcher. Height plus a slow stream is what aerates it; dumping the two together gives you sweet curdled cream.
- If it will not frothA whisk or an immersion blender will raise a foam, but the result is a whipped syllabub -- thicker and more like a dessert than the drink described. That is a legitimate version of the dish, just not this one.
- Yield and servingRoughly seven cups, or eight to ten small glasses. Serve at once in stemmed glasses; the froth separates from the liquid within an hour, and once it does it will not come back.
Syllabub is an English drink of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that survived in the American South long after it faded elsewhere, and the name's origin is genuinely unknown -- the frequently repeated derivation from Sillery in Champagne plus "bub" for a bubbling drink is folk etymology rather than anything documented. The earliest versions were made by milking a cow directly into a bowl of sweetened wine or cider, the force and warmth of the stream doing exactly what this recipe's high, slow pour imitates; recipe books of the eighteenth century sometimes still specify "under the cow." By the time Housekeeping in Old Virginia was compiled in 1879 the whipped, spoonable syllabub had largely taken over, so this contributor's version is the older and simpler form: a drink, not a dessert, and a use for the Madeira and sherry that any Virginia household of the period kept on hand.