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Dessert

Wiiipt Syllabub

A whipped cream dessert flavoured with lemon, sugar and wine or brandy, served layered over red wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 ↓

Wiiipt Syllabub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cream

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

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

  3. Squeeze the juice of the lemon into the mixture.

  4. Add a glass of Madeira wine or French brandy.

Whip and serve

  1. Use a chocolate mill to froth the mixture, removing the froth as it rises.

  2. Drain the froth in a hair sieve.

  3. Fill half a glass with red wine and carefully layer the froth on top.

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

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

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

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

  3. Cream + madeira winetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together146 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Lemon + red winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together779 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + madeira winetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together343 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Thick cream
Whips into a light, airy foam that forms the body of the syllabub.
Lemon
Its juice adds acidity that brightens the sweet, rich cream.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the cream and balances the acidity of the lemon.
Madeira wine or french brandy
Adds aroma and depth of flavour to the cream mixture.

The step that matters

Removing the froth as it rises. Cream foams and rises quickly under the mill, and the froth must be skimmed off as it forms. If it is left too long it can collapse or turn into over-whipped, grainy cream, so the foam stays light and fluffy only when it is taken off promptly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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