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London Syllabub
Dissolve 3 ounces of sugar in 1/2 pint of sherry, add some nutmeg and 2 quarts of milk direct from the cow; serve with white of egg, beaten, on top of each glass.
ENGLISH TRIFLE (as made at Windsor.).
Cut a pound of loaf cake into very thin slices, and arrange in a dish, with a custard, between each layer, of 1/2 pound of crushed macaroons, 1 glass of sherry, yolks of 4 eggs, 2 gills of milk, a teaspoonful of cornstarch, 2 ounces of sugar, and the zest and juice of a lemon. Cook this until thick, strain for use. After putting it in the layers of cake and over the top, spread a layer of apricot jam or plum marmalade over all, and finally spoonfuls of whipped cream, flavored with vanilla. Serve very cold. It can be garnished with citron and fruits.
Two recipes run together here: a syllabub built on unpasteurised milk, and a Windsor trifle whose custard is cooked. The first cannot be reproduced as printed; the notes below explain why, then deal with the trifle's measures and method.
- Why the syllabub failsIt depends on "2 quarts of milk direct from the cow" — raw, warm, unpasteurised milk, which is exactly what makes the drink foam as it is poured. Raw milk is a recognised vehicle for Listeria, Salmonella, Campylobacter and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, and nothing in this recipe brings it to any temperature at all. The sherry does not make it safe.
- The raw egg white on topThe beaten white is spooned onto the glass uncooked and never heated. That is a second, separate risk in the same drink. If you want a syllabub, use a current recipe written for pasteurised dairy.
- Gills and pintsIn the trifle, a gill is half a cup, so 2 gills of milk is 1 cup. The 1/2 pint of sherry in the syllabub is 1 cup; "1 glass" in the trifle is roughly 1/4 cup — the term was elastic and meant a wine glass, not a tumbler.
- Loaf cakeA plain, close-grained butter or pound cake baked in a loaf tin, not a sponge layer and not bread. Day-old is better than fresh: thin slices of a slightly dry cake hold their shape under the custard instead of collapsing.
- MacaroonsThese are crisp almond macaroons — small, dry, meringue-and-almond biscuits — not coconut macaroons and not French macarons. Amaretti are the closest thing on a modern shelf. Crushing half a pound gives the layers body and almond flavour.
- The custard is the hingeFour yolks, a cup of milk and a teaspoon of cornstarch cooked "until thick" means gentle heat or a double boiler, stirring, until it coats a spoon. Do not let it boil hard; yolks and acid will curdle. The recipe then tells you to strain it, which will catch zest and any lumps.
- Assembly and chillingCake, custard and crushed macaroons in alternating layers, jam over the top, whipped cream last. Give it at least four hours in the refrigerator, ideally overnight, so the cake absorbs the custard and the whole thing slices rather than slumps.
- YieldA pound of cake with half a pound of macaroons will roughly fill a two-quart dish; expect something like eight to ten servings. The recipe gives no quantity for the cream, only "spoonfuls of whipped cream."
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in strips or diced with the baking supplies around the winter holidays. Candied orange peel or glacé cherries do the same decorative work.
Syllabub is one of the oldest surviving English drinks, recorded from the sixteenth century onward, and in its earliest form the trick was agricultural rather than culinary: wine or cider sweetened and spiced in the bottom of a glass, then milked into directly from the cow so that the jet of warm milk hit the acid and frothed. Later versions abandoned the cow altogether in favour of whipped cream, which is how most people meet syllabub now. The trifle follows the standard nineteenth-century pattern — cake, wine, custard, jam, cream — and is labelled "as made at Windsor," a claim of English and royal prestige that the book offers without evidence.