Syllabub
Whip cream; mix other 1 cup sherry teaspoon cinnamon grated rind of one lemon ingredients, add whip, and serve in frappé glasses. Garnish with small bits of red cherries.
The text as printed has had its ingredient column collapsed into the method line, so read it as a short list — cream, 1 cup sherry, a teaspoon of cinnamon, the grated rind of one lemon — followed by the instruction to fold the whipped cream in last. Sugar is almost certainly missing from the list; period syllabubs are sweetened.
- The hingeFold the whipped cream into the flavoured sherry, not the reverse, and do it at the last moment. Acid and alcohol thin whipped cream quickly, so a syllabub assembled early separates into a foam cap over a pool of liquid.
- Cream to useHeavy or whipping cream at 36 percent fat or above, well chilled. Ultra-pasteurised cream will whip but holds less air; whip it only to soft peaks or it turns grainy once the sherry goes in.
- SherryA cup is a substantial amount of sherry, and the recipe gives no quantity for the cream, so the proportions have to be judged by eye. A medium or cream sherry suits the cinnamon and lemon; a dry fino will read as sour once the sugar is in. Add it gradually and taste.
- SugarAssume about 2 to 3 tablespoons of caster or superfine sugar, dissolved in the sherry before the cream goes in. Granulated sugar folded into cream stays gritty.
- Frappé glassesSmall stemmed glasses used for iced desserts. Coupe glasses, small tumblers or teacups do the same job.
- CherriesThe red cherries meant here are the bottled maraschino or glacé sort a 1907 pantry kept year-round, not fresh fruit. Either works as garnish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of cream; on an assumption of two cups, the mixture fills roughly six to eight small glasses. Serve at once, or within an hour if the glasses are kept very cold.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English sweets, recorded from the sixteenth century onward, and originally made by pouring cider or wine into a bowl and milking a cow directly into it, or squirting the milk in from a height so the acid curdled it to a froth. By the eighteenth century the kitchen version used cream whisked with wine, sugar and lemon until it foamed — the "whipt" syllabub — and the drinkable early type gradually disappeared. The name's origin is disputed; it is often said to combine "sill," for a wine from the Sillery region of Champagne, with "bub," old slang for a bubbling drink, but this is a traditional explanation rather than a documented one. Its appearance in Lowney's Cook Book, a chocolate manufacturer's promotional volume, shows how firmly the dish had settled into the American dessert repertoire by 1907: no explanation of what a syllabub was seemed necessary, only which glasses to serve it in.