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Dessert

Wine Syllabub

Wine Syllabub is a chilled dessert drink made with cream, wine, lemon juice, sugar, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Wine Syllabub

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syllabub

  1. Mix sugar with lemon juice and wine until dissolved.

  2. Add the cream and whip until frothy.

  3. Drain if necessary.

Serve

  1. Serve very cold in glasses with a wine-soaked bit of cake at the bottom.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 light, frothy foam that gives the syllabub its body.
Sherry, madeira, or port
Adds flavour and acidity-balanced sweetness, and thins the mixture as it whips.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and helps the mixture thicken as it whips.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and dissolves into the wine and lemon juice before the cream is added.

The step that matters

Whip the cream until frothy, then drain. Over-whipping cream turns it grainy and can cause it to separate, while the acid in the lemon and wine can thicken the cream unevenly. Stop once it is frothy and drain any liquid that has collected.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sherry, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon. 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.

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