Skip to main content
Dessert

Everlasting Whipped Syllabub

A chilled dessert made from cream, wine, lemon, sugar, and optional orange‑flower water, beaten into a frothy consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Everlasting Whipped Syllabub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat and sift the sugar.

  2. Mix the sifted sugar with the cream.

  3. Grate the yellow rind from the lemons. Grate the rind from the Seville orange, if using.

  4. Add the grated rinds to the cream.

Make the syllabub

  1. Squeeze the juice of the lemons into the wine. Add a little orange-flower water to the wine.

  2. Mix all ingredients together.

  3. Beat the mixture for 30 minutes with a whisk.

  4. Spoon the mixture into glasses. Serve.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Cream + orangetop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Cream
Whipped by beating, it forms the light, airy body of the dish.
Double refined sugar
Sweetens the dish and helps stabilise the whipped cream.
Old hock
Wine that adds flavour and acidity to the cream.
Sack
Fortified wine that adds body, flavour and acidity to the mixture.
Lemons
Juice adds acidity that thickens and sharpens the cream, and rind adds aroma.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture for 30 minutes with a whisk. Cream thickens as air is whipped into it and its fat network firms up. Adding acidic wine and juice before whipping can make it curdle or separate, so the mixture needs steady, attentive beating until it holds its shape.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, lemon, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, lemon, 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.

More syllabub recipes

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

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes