Everlasting Syllabub. Now you probably think that sounds like a silly sounding,
sweet, synonymous with supercilious, superficiality, but you would be wrong.
It is a very serious dessert.
Syllabub is so serious that Samuel Pepys wrote of it in his diary.
He went to Commissioner Pets house after a sermon at church and
"had a syllabub, and saw his closet which come short of what I expected,
but there was fine models of ships in it indeed, whose worth I could not judge of."
Very serious stuff, but super serious as this syllabub sounds
I'm going to teach you how to make this sweet frothy dessert which became popular in the 16th century.
Though back then syllabub, orsyllabub was a drink and it was made of wine, cream, and lemon juice.
The cream would curdle as it was froth
and then when poured into a glass the wine would separate and go to the bottom and then
that kind of frothy cream would be on top so it looked a little bit like a root beer float, I guess.
And when you sipped it you got some of both,
but as the centuries went on they removed some of the wine, not all but some of it
and added a lot more sugar which stabilized it so that when it was poured it didn't separate,
and thus in the mid 18th century we have everlasting syllabub.
So today in the most serious way possible I am going to teach you how to make everlasting syllabub,
this time in Tasting History.
Now one thing about this recipe is it is SO easy. I mean SO easy , it takes like no
time, and there's no cooking. There's no actual cooking involved. It's just you
mix the ingredients, you whip them up and you got yourself some syllabub. So
the recipe that we're using today comes from the 1747 book "The Art of Cookery
Made Plain and Easy" by a lady. That lady was named Hannah Glasse and we'll come
back to her later on. Anyway her recipe says to make everlasting syllabub take
five half pints of thick cream, a half pint of sack, the juice of two Seville
oranges (or lemons), grate in just the yellow rind of three lemons, and a pound
of double refined sugar, well beat and sifted. Mix all together with a spoonful
of orange flower water beat it well together with a whisk half an hour, then
with a spoon fill your glasses. That is a wonderfully specific recipe for the mid
18th century. It has timing, it has every ingredient, doesn't leave anything out
which they often do, and it has exact measurements. It's unbelievable for the
for the time that it comes from. That said Ms. Glass must have been extremely
popular because that's going to make enough for like 50 people. So we're gonna
cut this in half, and still have a ton of syllabub. Now before you get your hands
busy making that syllabub make sure to hit that Like button, and subscribe if
you haven't already. So what you'll need is 1 in 1/4 pint or 590 millilitres of
heavy cream. Now that conversion is done off of the U.S. pint because that was
actually closer to what would have been used in England in the mid 18th century.
They switched to the Imperial pint later on but this was the British pint which
is pretty much the same as the US pint. 1/4 pint or 120 milliliters of sack.
Now you're probably not going to be able to find sack wine. Sack referred to a
whole host of different wines that were somewhat sweet. Usually a lighter dessert
wine. So what I'm using is and if you can find it it's fantastic on its
own, and you want something of good quality because like I said we're not
cooking this so you're going to be able to taste that wine, so don't don't cheap
out on me. White port is amazing. Not always the easiest thing to find but you
could also use a dryer Riesling, nothing too too sweet or even a sherry will work,
mid-level sweet. Anyway but if you haven't tried white port get some white
port, because it's awesome. Then the juice of one orange, now if you have a Seville
orange like she said great, but you know who does? I think I have a California
orange so that's what I used. It was really quite nice. The zest of one large
lemon, or two small lemons. So if you're using like a Meyer lemon which would be
mmm perfect you'll probably want two cuz they're a little bit smaller, but it's
kind of up to you. 1/2 pound or 227 grams of powdered sugar and 1 teaspoon of
orange flower water.Now you're going to be tempted to use more than a teaspoon,
and you can use maybe a little bit more but more flower water as nice and light
as it sounds it's actually quite bitter so you don't want to use too too much of
it. Now before we start I want to point out that Ms. Glass says that you're
going to be whipping this syllabub by hand for a half-hour. They usually would
have used like a birch whisk and you know be my guest,
have at it but there is no shame in using a machine, an electric mixer
because just a few years after publishing her book a Dr.. Stephen Hales
invented a machine that made things go a lot faster. Specifically for syllabub, it
was a tube of tin with a box of the same at the lower end of it that is full of
small holes. This engine with the help of a pair of bellows blows up cream into
syllabub with great expedition. So if Dr. Hayles could use his syllabub engine i
think you're okay to use either a stand mixer, or a hand mixer. So now get ready
for the easiest recipe ever add your sugar and cream to a bowl and mix on
medium until the sugar has dissolved. Then you're going to add your orange
juice. Now if you squeezed your orange juice you could probably want to strain
it because there's gonna be a lot of pulp in there
you don't want too much pulp. You're gonna have the lemon zest so we want as
few solid ingredients as possible. Then with the mixer still going add the lemon
zest, the orange flower water, and the wine. Then get ready to either whisk for
a half hour by hand, or if you're using your electric mixer it should take you a
few minutes so you're gonna mix on high until it becomes like whipped cream. You
don't want to go too far because then it'll turn into like butter.
It''s just not gonna be the same, but you want it nice and fluffy until it can
hold a nice stiff peak. So while you're whisking I am going to geek out over
Hannah Glasse's "The art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy". Now one thing that made
this cookbook so special and worked so well was that Hannah Glasse wrote it
with female servants in mind which was a fairly new concept, and I'm sure she
didn't mean it in a condescending way, but I'm kind of in love with one of her
opening statements about why she wrote the book the way that she did. She says
"To the reader if I have not wrote in the Hyppolite style I hope I shall be
forgiven for my intention is to instruct the lower sort and therefore must treat
them in their own way. For example when I bid them lard afoul if I should bid them
lard with large lardoons, they would not know what I meant,
but when I say they must lard with little pieces of bacon, they know what I
mean, so in many other things in cookery the great cooks have such a high way of
expressing themselves that the poor girls are at a loss to know what they
mean." I just love that, it's so it's condescending
but it worked it actually worked and it became an instant bestseller and it
stayed in print for over a century with over 40 different editions all over the
world it became like the English-speaking world's cookbook. I mean
different editions would add and subtract things based on when they were
made but also where they were made whether it was in America. It was
actually very popular with like Ben Franklin had a copy and Thomas
Jefferson had one in his kitchen. It's amazing,
but it had one of the first recipes for Yorkshire pudding. It had one of the
first recipes for something called Hamburg sausages aka
hamburgers that was in the American version, and it has one of the first
recipes to make a curry the Indian Way. That's kind of a staple of English
cuisine now, you can get Indian style curry pretty much everywhere. It's such a
staple of English cuisine that I think it would actually be a very cool recipe
to do on the show, and do a little bit of history about how Indian food came to
England. What I will not be doing though I kind of love to is one of her recipes
for chocolate, and it's because in addition to some really interesting
ingredients like musk, and pepper, and aniseed it also calls for ambergris
which is a solid flammable substance found in the digestive tract of sperm
whales, and I have called every Trader Joe's in town, and no sperm whale
ambergris. So womp. But sperm whale innards aside the book was a watershed
for the home cook. Her easy conversational style was just a breath
of fresh air for cookbooks in that day and age. She gave the reader permission
to not take cooking so seriously as so many books did before this. After giving
meticulous details about how to make several dishes in one chapter. She
finishes it with you must do just as you like it. That's wonderful. Now there were
really just two major critiques when the book came out, and in the years
following. One being that people just refused to believe that she wrote it.
People refused to believe that a lady wrote it ,because in the worlds of Samuel
Johnson of dictionary fame, "Women can spin very well, but they cannot make a
good book of cookery." Clearly he never met Julia Child, or the two fat ladies
but whatever. The other criticism had a little bit more merit, and that was that
the book had an extreme anti-Galatian prejudice but even when she was hating
on the French she said it in such a cool way. "If gentlemen will have French cooks
they must pay for French tricks. A Frenchman in his own country
would dress a fine dinner of 20 dishes and all genteel and pretty, for the
expense he will put an English Lord to for dressing one dish...I have heard of a
cook that used six pounds of butter to fry 12 eggs when everybody knows {that
understands cooking) that half a pound is full enough or more than need be used,
but then it would not be French. So much is the blind folly of this age
that they would rather be imposed on by a French booby, than give encouragement
to a good English." Cook isn't that amazing?
I just... sick burn, sick burn Hanna Glass. Hm, but you know what cannot burn is our
syllabub, because we're not cooking it, but you should be done whisking it by
now. So once you're done whisking if you're not going to serve the syllabub
right then put it into the refrigerator so it really holds its shape. Otherwise
if you are going to serve it right then just spoon it into a glass as Ms.
Hanna says. And really any glass is going to work for this. Back in the day they
had special syllabub glasses tall, and and fancy but I don't have those so I'm
just using a little martini glass, but you can use whatever you have wine glass
works. Yeah, okay here we go. I'm super excited it is beautiful it just looks so
fluffy, and wonderful, and you know you can, I garnished it because I'm fancy
with a little orange rind and some mint, but you don't need a
garnish. You can garnish it with whatever you want. Let's try it. It''s so... you
can hear it, like the little air bubbles just popping. It's mmm, okay, OKAY.
This, if you're not making this shame on you. It is hot out, it is summer. This is
like, it's so light and fluffy, and you can taste the, you can really taste the
orange, and that's why you definitely don't want to do too much of that
orange flower water, but it's there, but you can also taste the wine and it's
just so soft and ah. This would actually go really well also like on some berries or
another dessert. Oh you could actually put it on to like some pie, or cake that
doesn't have a very strong flavor, like even just like a chocolate cake very
like a neutral chocolate cake put some of this on top. I get an orange chocolate
cake that's mmm. Make this if you're not
making this, no excuses this is the easiest recipe ever. No
excuses. Go make this, hit the Like button, subscribe and I will see you next time
onTasting History.