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Strawberry Syllabub
2 cups cream 1 cup sugar 1½ cups strawberry juice 1/4 cup lemon juice whites of two eggs Mix sugar and fruit juice. Add beaten whites and cream. Continue beating until stiff. Arrange sliced strawberries in the bottom of frappé glasses, add cream mixture, and garnish with slices of strawberries on top. 1 cup prunes 1/2 box gelatine cup cold water
A late-Victorian and Edwardian dessert syllabub, thickened with nothing but whipped cream and raw egg white. The raw egg is the problem, and it is not incidental — it is the structure of the dish.
- Why the cautionThe egg whites are beaten in raw and the mixture is never heated at any stage. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and, less often, within the white and yolk, and nothing in this method reduces that risk. Anyone wanting a strawberry syllabub should follow a current recipe.
- It also sits at room temperatureIt also is never chilled by instruction -- The finished cream is spooned into glasses, garnished, and served, with no direction to hold it cold. Between the raw egg and the uncooked dairy, any time spent at room temperature adds to the risk.
- The stray lines at the end"1 cup prunes / box gelatine / cup cold water" is not part of this recipe. It appears to be the opening of a neighbouring entry that has run in from adjacent text, and it lacks its remaining quantities and any method.
- Cream, in 1907 termsCream -- "Cream" in a book of this period meant a rich cream suitable for whipping; the nearest modern equivalent is heavy or whipping cream. Anything lighter, including half-and-half, will not stiffen no matter how long it is beaten.
- Strawberry juiceNot a bottled product. It meant ripe berries crushed and pressed or strained through a cloth, which is why the recipe can call for a volume of it rather than a weight of fruit. A pound and a half of berries yields something in that neighbourhood, though ripeness swings it considerably.
- Frappé glassesSmall stemmed or footed glasses, roughly the size of a modern coupe or large sherbet glass, used for iced and semi-frozen desserts. The recipe as written would fill six to eight of them.
- On the sweetnessA cup of sugar against two cups of cream is very sweet by current taste, and the sugar is doing structural work as well — it slows the cream and helps the aerated mixture hold. This is worth knowing before treating the proportion as arbitrary.
Syllabub is an English dish of considerable age, recorded from the sixteenth century onward, and originally a drink rather than a spoon dessert: cream or milk was curdled with wine, cider or verjuice, and the whey drunk from beneath the foam. The name's origin is genuinely unknown, though it is often said to combine "sill" — Sillery, the Champagne place name — with "bub" for a bubbling drink; the etymology should be treated as folklore rather than fact. By the eighteenth century cooks were making "everlasting" or "whipt" syllabubs, beating the mixture so it held its froth and could be piled into glasses, and it is that stiff version that survives here. What Lowney's has done is replace the wine with fruit juice — the acid still does the old work of thickening the cream — which fits the era's fashion for strawberries served in fancy glassware.