Syllabubs, Whipped
INGREDIENTS for 8 glasses. pint of cream, pint of sherry, half that quantity of brandy, the juice of 1/21 lemon, a little grated nutmeg, 3 oz. of pounded sugar, whipped cream the same as for trifle. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 9d.
Mix all the ingredients together, put the them heap a little whipped cream, made in the same manner as for trifle. Solid syllabub is made by whisking or milling the mixture to a stiff froth, and putting it in the glasses, without the whipped cream at the top.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Syrup for Compôtes. - INGREDIENTS for syrup for good-sized dish.-1 lb. of sugar, 1½ pint of water. AVERAGE COST, 3d.
Boil the water and sugar together for 15 minutes, carefully removing the scum as it rises. Boil the fruit intended for the compôte in this syrup till sufficiently done, and serve the dish when cold, or iced in summer.
TIME.-15 minutes to boil the syrup.
Syrup for Jellies, To Clarify. allow 2 lbs. of loaf sugar; the white of -INGREDIENTS.-To every quart of water 1 egg.
Put the sugar and water into a stewpan; dissolved, add the white of the egg, whipped set it on the fire, and, when the sugar is up with a little water. Whisk the whole well together, and simmer very gently until it has thrown up all the scum. Take this off as it rises, strain the syrup through a fine sieve or cloth into a basin, and keep it for use.
SALMON. "The dinner waits and we are tired."
COWPER.
TAMARIND SAUCE.
TARTARE SAUCE.
AMARIND Tapioca Pudding. INGREDIENTS Sauce. (Indian for pudding for 6 persons. -3 oz. of tapioca, Recipe.)-INGREDI- 1 quart of milk, 2 oz. of butter, lb. of sugar, ENTS.--Tamarind, 3 eggs, flavouring of vanilla, grated lemonpounded loaf sugar.
Fill a stone jar with the fruit when thoroughly ripe, and stew in a cool oven till tender, adding enough pounded loaf sugar to take off some of the acidity of the fruit, but not enough to destroy the flavour, as this should be an acid sauce.
When quite soft, rub through a sieve.
Tapioca and Apple Pudding. -INGREDIENTS for pudding for 6 persons. -A cupful of tapioca, 2 lbs. of cooking apples, 1 lemon, sugar to taste. AVERAGE COST, 9d.
Soak the tapioca over-night in cold water, and in the morning pour over it a pint of boiling water, and cook slowly for 20 minutes. Pare and core the apples, and cover the bottom of a pudding-dish with them, with their cavities filled with sugar.
Squeeze over some lemon juice, sweeten the tapioca, and pour it over the apples, and bake one hour in a slow oven.
TIME.-1 hour and 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE in autumn and winter. rind, or bitter almonds. AVERAGE COST, 11d.
Wash the tapioca, and let it stew gently in the milk by the side of the fire for 1/4 hour, occasionally stirring it; then let it cool a little; mix with it the butter, sugar and eggs, which should be well beaten, and flavour with either of the above ingredients, putting in about 12 drops of the essence of almonds or vanilla, whichever is preferred.
Butter a pie-dish, and line the edges with puff-paste; put in the pudding, and bake in a moderate oven for an hour. If the pudding is to be boiled, add a little more tapioca, and boil it in a buttered basin 1 hour.
TIME.-1 hour to bake, 1½ hour to boil.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A whipped syllabub is cream, fortified wine and lemon beaten to a froth and served in glasses. The method is simple; the difficulty is that the printed quantities here have lost their fractions, so the proportions need judgement.
- The proportions as printedThe list reads "pint of cream, pint of sherry" with the fractions missing, and the lemon is given as "1/21". The likeliest reading is 1 pint of cream to half a pint of sherry, with the brandy at half the wine's volume (as the text itself states) and the juice of half a lemon; treat the numbers on the page as unreliable and go by taste.
- The hinge: acid, sugar, then creamThe recipe says only to mix all the ingredients together, but it is worth dissolving the sugar in the sherry, brandy and lemon juice before the cream goes near them: sugar dissolves poorly in cold cream, and acid poured onto cream that has already thickened can turn it grainy.
- WhippingUse cream of at least 36% fat (UK double or US heavy). Whisk only to soft, floppy peaks; the alcohol and acid keep thickening the mixture as it stands, and an over-beaten syllabub turns to butter grains in the glass.
- Whipped versus solidThe "whipped" version is a loose, half-liquid froth spooned into glasses, traditionally with a clearer wine layer settling beneath. The "solid" version, described at the end, is beaten stiff enough to stand and needs no cream on top.
- MillingTo "mill" is to froth with a wooden chocolate mill or whisk spun between the palms. A balloon whisk or a mixer on low speed does the same work; a high speed will overwhip in seconds.
- NutmegGrate it over at the moment of serving. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma and will taste dusty against the wine.
- Timing and yieldEight glasses, as stated. It can be made some hours ahead so the wine settles out below the froth; the recipe gives no guidance on keeping, and how long the foam stands will depend on how stiffly it is whisked.
- The cost line1s. 9d. is the Victorian retail cost for the whole quantity, not a measurement. It is a useful marker of what cream and sherry cost relative to a household's budget.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English sweets, recorded from the sixteenth century onward, and its early form was made by milking a cow directly into a bowl of spiced cider or wine so that the warm stream froth. The acid in the wine curdles the cream just enough to hold air, which is why the drink separates into a clear boozy layer under a thick collar of foam; the "everlasting" or solid syllabub, whipped stiff and eaten with a spoon, was the later refinement and the one that survived longest on the dinner table. By Mrs Beeton's day it had settled into this fixed pattern of cream, sherry, brandy, lemon and nutmeg, served in small glasses alongside jellies and trifles as part of a dessert course, and the cross-reference to trifle here reflects how closely the two dishes were related in a Victorian kitchen: the same whipped cream topping did duty for both.