The syllabub is an English confection in which cream or fresh milk is blended into wine or cider along with sugar and spices to create a sumptuous, delicate dairy topping resting above the alcohol. Unlike its close relative the posset, the syllabub is not thickened by heating but through whipping or otherwise frothing the dairy element into the airy lightness that is the drink’s signature: William King wrote in 1704,“Thy white wine, sugar, milk, together club / To make that gentle viand, syllabub.” The syllabub’s very name would become synonymous with frivolity, fashion, and ephemeral pleasures.
The “solybubbe” is mentioned as far back as John Heywood’s 1537 Thersytes, while one of the earliest published recipes for syllabub appears in the 1658 compendium The Queens Closet Opened by one “W. M.”: “Fill your Sillabub-pot with Syder (for that is the best for a Sillabub) and good store of Sugar and a little Nutmeg; stir it well together, put in as much thick Cream by two or three spoonfuls at a time, as hard as you can, as though you milke it in, then stir it together exceeding softly once about, and let it stand two hours at least ere it is eaten, for the standing makes the Curd.”
The Sense of Taste, a silver tray proffers a collection of multicolored syllabubs to the fashionable revelers pictured.The drinks Mercier represents are likely to be examples of “whipt syllabub,” in which whisking of the wine and cream produced prodigious bubbles, which is then left to dry overnight in a sieve. The 1757 cookbook author Hannah Glasse recommends the use of a chocolate mill to rapidly froth an “everlasting syllabub” from a mixture of cream, sack, Rhenish wine, sugar, orange juice, and lemon peel. Purpose-built syllabub churns of metal, not unlike small butter churns, were manufactured through the nineteenth century in both England and the United States as quick-acting syllabub aerators.
As delicate as the foam atop the glass, the fashion for syllabubs receded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Recipe (Sir Kenelm Digby’s Whip Posset): Combine in a nonreactive bowl 500 ml whipping cream, 60 ml fine sugar, the whites of 2 eggs, and 120 ml oloroso sherry. Whip until the mixture begins to froth. Skim off the froth and put it into a deep, footed 1-liter vessel. Repeat until bowl is empty.
Day, Ivan. “Further Musings on Syllabub.” Petits Propos Culinaires 53 (1996).
Digby, Kenelm. The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie, Knight, Opened. London: 1669.
W. M. The Queens Closet Opened: Being Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chyrurgery, Preserving, Candying, and Cookery, and Which Were Presented to the Queen. London: 1658.
By: William Tipper