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Dessert

Our Grandmother's Syllabub

A frothy dessert made with lemon, sherry, cream, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Our Grandmother's Syllabub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Grate the lemon peels.

  2. Express the juice.

  3. Add the sugar to the lemon juice and peel.

  4. Pour in the sherry wine.

  5. Stir until the sugar is thoroughly moistened.

Combine and whip

  1. Slowly add the cream.

  2. Mix well.

  3. Use a whip to remove the floating bubbles from the surface.

  4. Drop spoonfuls into lemonade or champagne glasses until all the cream is whipped.

  5. If the mixture becomes too thick, dilute with sweet milk.

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

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

  2. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  4. Lemon + sugartop 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).

Lemon and sugar 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

Rich cream
Provides the body and airy, whipped texture of the dessert.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and balances the rich cream.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the mixture and dissolves easily into the liquids.
Sherry wine
Adds liquid and aromatic flavour that carries through the dessert.

The step that matters

Slowly add the cream. Adding cream gradually to the acidic, sugared liquid helps keep it smooth and prevents it from curdling or becoming grainy. Thickness can then be adjusted with milk if needed.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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