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Dessert

Whipped Syllabub

A frothy dessert made with lemon, cream, sugar, sherry or madeira, and topped with red wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sherry and red wine share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Whipped Syllabub

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Rub the lump of sugar on the outside of the lemon until colored.

  2. Put the sugar into a pint of cream and sweeten to taste.

  3. Squeeze in the juice of the lemon and add the sherry or madeira.

  4. Whip the mixture to a froth, removing the froth as it rises.

  5. Drain the froth well in a sieve.

Serve

  1. Half fill a glass with red wine and pile the froth on top as high as possible.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sherry + red winetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Lemon + sherrytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,273 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Cream + sherrytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cream
Whipped into a froth, it forms the light, airy topping of the dessert.
Sherry or madeira
Adds fortified wine sweetness and depth of flavour to the cream.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the cream and balances its sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream, and rubbing it on the lemon rind lifts aromatic oils into it.

The step that matters

Draining the froth. Whipping makes the froth rise and collect liquid beneath it. Draining it well in a sieve removes that watery liquid, so the froth stays thick and holds its shape when piled on the wine.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream, sherry, red wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream, sherry, red wine. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More syllabub recipes

Whipped 15Staffordshire 7Lemon 6Birthday 3 See all 113 →

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