Syllabub

I came across the word syllabub for the first time just a couple of weeks ago, while reading Bee Wilson's ridiculously good Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, which is honestly the best book I've read all year. Right in the middle of a chapter about mixing and grinding foods was this weird word, not quite syllabus and not quite Lil Bub, but enough of each that I couldn't stop thinking about it and had to do some research.

The syllabub has a long history, most of which I ended up getting from Historic Food, the site of food historian Ivan Day, who also appears in Wilson's book as a sort of mythic figure who has helped preserve and understand the food traditions of Ye Olde England and stuff.

Nobody has an exact date for when syllabubs first arrived on the scene, or how, but Day says the dessert dates back to the sixteenth century. Supposedly the original recipe involved milking a cow directly into a container of wine or cider, resulting in a sort of frothy-ish, rich, boozy deliciousness. I haven't been able to find anybody who actually believes that origin story, mainly because it's hard to imagine fancy Tudor England folks eating something like that, with bits of cow hair and dirt in it and everything. HOW COARSE AND UNCOUTH!

The oldest surviving recipes involve some sort of citrus peel in wine and lemon juice, combined with cream and beaten to a froth, sometimes with rosemary branches to impart extra flavor. Over the course of an hour or so the mixture would be beaten, and as the mixture frothed, the bubbles would be removed and set in a strainer and left to drain overnight, which would result and a very dry foam that would be put over more wine in a glass.

Most contemporary syllabub recipes take the form of a wine- or liqueur-infused whipped cream, served over some sort of cookie whose flavor pairs well with the infused cream, or sometimes even nothing at all, letting the flavors of the cream, wine and citrus be the main event.

For my syllabub, here's what I used:

Wine Infusion:

1/2 cup chardonnay (I grabbed the cheapest one I could find)
1 orange (you'll be using the peel and some of the juice)
a sprig of fresh rosemary

**You are gonna have to let this shit infuse overnight, so plan it out!

First off, let me say: I am no expert in infusing wine with fruit and herbs. You could go so far as to say that I've never done it before. So my decisions in this recipe were a bit arbitrary. We will be seeing the hopefully okay results together.

Use a peeler or a knife to get a few (I used three) curls of orange peel. If you are not experienced in using citrus peel, let me emphasize: DO NOT GET THE PITH! The pith is that white part just beneath the peel. Orange peel is filled with amazing oils that give us that fantastic orange smell, and that's what you want to impart to the wine. The pith is bitter and gross and will therefore make your wine taste bitter and gross, and your syllabub, etc. So just don't do it, alright?

Pour your wine into a small bowl and toss in the orange peel. Crush the rosemary with your fingers to release some of the essential oils, which helps with the infusion, then toss it in as well. It will look like this:

That's pretty much what you expected orange peel and rosemary in a bowl of wine to look like, right?

I let that sit overnight, and the next day I strained it and put the wine (which was pretty orange-y, but not as rosemary-y, despite all ten seconds of effort I put into crushing the rosemary), into a large bowl, where I added:

1/8 cup orange juice 
3 Tbsp sugar

and beat it up real good with a whisk, trying to incorporate the sugar as much as possible. Then I added

1 cup whipping cream

and beat it up some more, until it attained the consistency of regular-ass whipped cream. That was it! It was easy.

And the truth was that it was really tasty. The rosemary flavor really, really got lost, so I'd try to remedy that the next time around, but the orange and wine shone through. Even Beth, who thought for sure that it was gonna be gross, liked it. We put it in our favorite glass and ate it for dessert that night.

It was such an easy thing to make, that it's easy to wonder why it was considered such a high-class thing back in the day. One of the things I picked up from Bee Wilson's book was that back in the days of households having a large amount of kitchen staff, you could expect a servant to whip cream for an hour just so you could enjoy what is essentially a boozy, flavored whipped cream (keep in mind that they didn't have balloon whisks yet, so they really were using tree branches, which takes decidedly longer). It was a sign of status to serve such dishes to your guests. Recipes called for eggs to be beaten until the arms of two servants were tired. Whipped and (what we would now call) pureed dishes were considered the pinnacle of society. Nowadays we use the word refined to mean high-class, but originally it referred specifically to the texture of dishes that only the rich could afford. But as Wilson says, the playing field was leveled as the masses gained access to food processing technology. The upper echelons of society, then, moved toward deifying the rustic traditions of their nations, with all their wonderful textures, and flavors that are balanced not by a smooshing together of ingredients into a paste, but by the skillful hand of a chef.