To make a fine Syllabub from the Cow

History

Syllabub sets a frothy, curdled cap of cream over a pool of sweetened, spiced liquor, the cream or milk thickened by the acid of wine or cider. Amelia Simmons records the dish in two of its historical forms. The first, "To make a fine Syllabub from the Cow," sweetens a quart of cider with double-refined sugar, grates in nutmeg, and directs the cook to milk the cow straight into the liquor before pouring sweet cream over the top. This is the older, more literal method: milk sprayed warm from the udder into the acidic drink threw up a natural froth, and the earliest syllabubs were exactly this, a drink of cider and milk left to curdle. Simmons's second recipe, "A Whipt Syllabub," works the froth deliberately: cream, white wine, grated lemon peel and the whites of three eggs are whisked, and the foam is skimmed off as it rises and spooned into glasses or pots.

The two recipes mark a real historical divide. The cow-milked syllabub belonged to the dish's beginnings as a curdled drink; by the seventeenth century it had evolved into a dessert made with sweet white wine, the whisked-and-skimmed version Simmons places second, in which the whipped ingredients separate and the curdled cream floats to the top to be lifted off into glasses. Syllabub had been known in England since at least the sixteenth century and remained a fixture of British cooking into the nineteenth, and Simmons carries both its old and newer faces into the first American cookbook.

What her text does not tell us is how these recipes actually lived in American kitchens: whether her readers truly milked a cow into cider or reached instead for the whisk, and on what tables either version appeared. The record here keeps the method, not the meal.

Ingredients

• 1 quart cyder
• double refined sugar
• nutmeg
• milk
• 1/2 pint or more cream

Instructions

1. Sweeten a quart of cyder with double refined sugar.
2. Grate nutmeg into it.
3. Milk the cow directly into the liquor, adding as much milk as you think proper.
4. Pour half a pint or more of the sweetest cream all over it, in proportion to the quantity of syllabub.