Syllabub is a sweet dish made by curdling sweet cream or milk with an acid such as wine or cider. It was a popular British confection from the 16th to the 19th centuries.[1]
Early recipes for syllabub are for a drink of cider with milk. By the 17th century it had evolved into a type of dessert made with sweet white wine. More wine could be added to make a punch, but it could also be made to have a thicker consistency that could be eaten with a spoon, used as a topping for trifle, or to dip fingers of sponge cake into.[2] The holiday punch, sweet and frothy, was often considered a ladies' drink. The milk and cream used in those days would have been thicker and modern recipes may need to make some adjustments to achieve the same effect.[3]
History
Look up syllabub in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Syllabub (or solybubbe, sullabub, sullibib, sullybub, sullibub; there is no certain etymology and considerable variation in spelling)[4][5] has been known in England at least since Nicholas Udall'sThersytes of 1537: "You and I... Muste walke to him and eate a solybubbe."[6] The word occurs repeatedly, including in Samuel Pepys's diary for 12 July 1663; "Then to Comissioner Petts and had a good Sullybub"[7] and in Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown at Oxford of 1861; "We retire to tea or syllabub beneath the shade of some great oak."[8]
a quart of thick cream, and half a pint of sack, the juice of two Seville oranges or lemons, grate in the peel of two lemons, half a pound of double refined sugar.[9]
These were whipped together and poured into glasses. The curdled cream separated and floated to the top.
^Udall, Nicholas, (October 1537 [first performance]; 1550 [first printing]) A new Enterlude called Thersytes; reprinted in: Axton, Marie [ed.], (1982) "Thersites" in Three Tudor Classical Interludes: Thersites, Jacke Jugeler, Horestes, 240 Hills Road, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer--Rowman & Littlefield, line 656, page 56, ISBN 0859910962.
