Syllabub: Irish Coffee's Great-Great- Grandfather!

Syllabub is the great-great-grandfather of Irish Coffee

As a contributor noted on the delightful “Diary of Samuel Pepys” (with daily entries from Pepys 17^th C diary and modern commentary) “Syllabub was a popular dessert in seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth century England. It was popular for celebrations, special occasions and holidays due to its festive appearance. Many original recipes survive with various modes of preparation. Generally Syllabub was made with a mixture of whipped cream, whipped egg whites, white wine, sugar, lemon juice and zest of lemon. "

“The quantity of white wine used dramatically alters the finished dish, allowing the cook to produce either a creamy dessert or a thick, rich punch. Drinkers of the punch, easily identified by a milky white mustache, would be equally pleased if the white wine were replaced with cider, though they’d also be satisfied with a dash or two of sherry.

“In the seventeenth century, a milkmaid would send a stream of new, warm milk directly from a cow into a bowl of spiced cider or ale. A light curd would form on top with a lovely whey underneath. This, according to Elizabeth David, was the original syllabub. Today’s syllabub is more solid (its origins can also be traced to the seventeenth century, albeit to the upper classes) and mixes sherry and/or brandy, sugar, lemon, nutmeg, and double cream into a custard-like dessert or an eggnog-like beverage, depending upon the cook.”

Syllabub

1 Pint of Heavy Cream

½ c sugar, put in a coffee grinder and ground till powdery.

1/3 c New York Malmsey Madeira + 2 T

1 egg white, whipped (optional)

¾ c Riesling wine

Grated rind of a lemon ( you can add the juice of the lemon if you want it more lemony)

A few gratings of Nutmeg

Rosemary sprigs for decoration & 1 Tb of needles for steeping.

Pour the Riesling wine, bruised rosemary needles, 1/2 the lemon rind, 2 T Madeira and 2 T of sugar into a container shake and let steep for an hour, covered.

Whip the cream with all but 2 T of the sugar, ½ the lemon rind, nutmeg and the Madeira (add the egg white if you wish).

Stir ¼ c. of the cream mixture into the wine (remove the rosemary needles if you would like) and pour the wine into 4 glasses. Top with the cream and put a sprig of rosemary in the glass.

* May I advise, this is best the next day (which is how it was often done) if you leave the rosemary in, the herb flavors the magic wine at the bottom...use a spoon and dunk down... or be wild and get a syllabub moustache!

Syllabub/Jelly Glass 1780/ Marris Antique Glass

Syllabub (from Sir Kenelm Digby's The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened)

My Lady Middlesex makes Syllabubs for little Glasses with spouts, thus. Take 3 pints of sweet Cream, one of quick white wine (or Rhenish), and a good wine glassful (better the 1/4 of a pint) of Sack: mingle with them about three quarters of a pound of fine Sugar in Powder. Beat all these together with a whisk, till all appeareth converted into froth. Then pour it into your little Syllabub-glasses, and let them stand all night. The next day the Curd will be thick and firm above, and the drink clear under it. I conceive it may do well, to put into each glass (when you pour the liquor into it) a sprig of Rosemary a little bruised, or a little Limon-peel, or some such thing to quicken the taste; or use Amber-sugar, or spirit of Cinnamon, or of Lignum-Cassiæ; or Nutmegs, or Mace, or Cloves, a very little.

From "The London Art Of Cookery and Domestic Housekeepers' Complete Assistant", 1811 by John Farley.

Syllabub/Jelly Glasses 1760- 1780 Marris Antique Glass

Whipt Syllabubs

Rub a lump of loaf sugar on the outside of a lemon, put it into a pint of thin cream, and sweeten it to the taste. Then put in the juice of a lemon, and a glass of Madeira wine or French brandy. Mill it to a froth with a chocolate mill, and take it off as it rises, and lay it into a hair sieve. Then fill one half of the glasses a little more than half full with white wine, and the other half of the glasses a little more than half full with red wine: lay on the froth as high as possible ; but take care that it is well drained on a sieve, otherwise it will mix with the wine, and the syllabub will be thereby spoiled.

Hippocras

Have you read Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief"? How she made me love those orchid hunter's addictions to "mystery, beauty, unknowability". I found myself circling her words nodding yes, yes, yes, all Molly Bloomy when I read, "The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it… the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility. 

Haven't you always wanted to be one of that novel race of beings who "didn't feel part of this modern world and this moment in time -- the world of petty aggravations and obligations and boundaries, a time of bored cynicism -- because how they live and what they lived for was so optimistic. They sincerely loved something… lived for a myth about themselves and the idea about adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives whatever they dreamed." Vivat, vivat orchid hunters and passionate souls everywhere!

I say the quest instinct, unquenchable curiosity and hunger for adventure and discovery –– hunger to know and understand, hunger for mystery and magic and hunger to obtain (or prepare) the rare and unobtainable is wired in to us. Whenever I go to a great greenmarket I see endless possibilities before me, don't you? As I blog I read and learn and expand my realm of possibilities and tastes. I escape the mundane "now" and taste history. From my stove I can taste the world, past and present. It's really a wonderful journey.

My first hunt for elusive edible treasure came long before search engines. I was looking for grains of paradise. For the uninitiated, grains of paradise, or aframomum melegueta, come from the seed pod of a lavender-blushing-white flowered relative of the ginger family. Grains of paradise made their way into Europe during the spice craze of the Middle Ages. It was called the poor man's pepper then -- although not as hot as black pepper and possessing a dusky, perfumed after-taste –– they are intoxicating.

Discovering they were from West Africa, I called their embassy. Fifteen people down the line and a fortune in local minutes later, I found out that there just happened to be a freighter from that coast sitting at the NY docks with a shipment of the stuff destined for an African neighborhood in Brooklyn. One more phone-call, and a few weeks of custom's wrangling later, and I had my grains of paradise.

How times have changed! I just found a grains of paradise/cubeb pepper grinder in the spice section of Whole Foods in NYC! Now it's easy to get many of the formerly impossible-to-find ingredients for historic recipes. WARNING! One of the sneaky problems with transcriptions of really old recipes that were made in the mid to late 20th century is that they skip the hard to find and substitute without telling you –– beware those recipes if you treasure authenticity.

To memorialize my search for grains of paradise so long ago –– I thought a good holiday recipe for Hippocras, the ancient spiced wine, would do the trick.

To research my Hipprocras I went to The Forme of Cury which was compiled from Richard II's master cooks in 1390.

I was guided there by an old Lorna Sass book I'd gotten from the Met when I was a kid. Here are Ypocrasse instructions from the 18th c Samuel Pegge copy of the vellum manuscript:

Further research led me back to a favorite website run by a genius named Ivan Day in England at Historic Food (let me also mention his amazing book: Cooking in Europe, 1650-1850). 

From his wonderful site I discovered many remarkable facts about hippocras or ypcras (too many to mention –– go to his website for a full tutorial!) in which he related:

One of the rarest spices used in the production of hippocras was
carpobalsamum, the aromatic flower buds of the Balsam of Judea
Tree. In the eighteenth century a grove of the trees grew in the
gardens belonging to the Sultan of Cairo.They were guarded
night and day by armed janissaries to protect both the valuable
balsam and the flowerbuds from thieves. Musk seeds, another
Egyptian spice, were also used to scent hippocras, though the most
popular perfuming ingredients for the beverage were the animal
products musk and ambergris. Scented hippocras was served
with the bridecakes at Tudor weddings.

Mr. Day kindly included a recipe for using carpobalsam from "The
Art and Mystery of Vintners and Wine Coopers (London 1698):

Cinnamon 3 ounces, Carpobalsamum 2 ounces, Cardamum and Cubebs,
Gallingal half an ounce, Gingiberis one ounce, Grana Paradisi 3
pennyworth.

Basically, hippocras is a spiced wine that was usually augmented
with cinnamon, cardamom, grains of paradise and long pepper.

The recipe from the Forme of Cury advises:

Pur fait Ypocras.
Treys Unces de canell. Et iii unces de gyngener.
spykenard de Spayn le pays dun deneres. garyngale.
clowes, gylofre. poivr long, noiez mugadez.
maziozame cardemonij de chescun i.qrt douce
grayne & de paradys flour de queynel de
chescun dimid unce de toutes. soit fait
powdour and serve it forth

This is more or less translated to:
3 ounces of cinnamon
3 ounces of ginger.
a penny's worth (or a penny's size piece or 1.275 grams?)
of spikenard (I used 2 oz of the wrong thing the first time I made it–– I used 
a root from the US –– true spikenard is green and musky smelling and tasting, 
you don't need much!)
1/4 of an ounce each of galingale, cloves, long pepper,
nutmeg, marjoram and cardamom
1 ounce of grains of paradise and of cassia buds
Make powders of all and serve it forth.

All recipes during this time are loosely written, and this
one more than most. Honestly, no matter how hard you try,
translations for this manuscript are really dodgy. The
passage in the book is written in an odd English/French mix
that isn't really anywhere else in the manuscript. Many
translations didn't bother with telling you there was marjoram
in the mix and stuck with the spices. The amount of spikenard
is really confusing. It could be an amount (denier is 1.275 grams
which is really tiny) or the size of a coin, or the cost of the
spice. Almost all the translations said that flour de queynel
was powdered cinnamon, which made no sense since the recipe
had asked for cinnamon at the beginning and requested that
you powder everything at the end. It took a lot to find it
was cassia berries, which taste like old red-hot candies...a bright
cinnamon flavor. A little more of one spice or less of another
will not be in-authentic. The strongest tastes of the hippocras
are cinnamon and ginger then spikenard.

That said, this amount of spice mixture was probably used for
a gallon of red wine. One recipe recommended hanging each
spice in a separate bag, soaking them in wine in
separate basins and then squeezing them in a larger basin
to your taste (more cinnamon, squeeze harder on bag 1!).
More simply, the spices can be put altogether in a cheese
cloth bag or thrown into the wine and strained out later.

Cubeb and grains of paradise on the cinnamon stick

Hippocras

3 ounces of cinnamon
3 ounces of ginger.
a penny's worth (or a penny's size piece or 1.275 grams?)
of spikenard -– try a tablespoon and taste up to 1/4 c)

1/4 of an ounce each of galingale, cloves, long pepper,
nutmeg, marjoram and cardamom
1 ounce of grains of paradise and of cassia buds
Make powders of all and serve it forth.

1 gallon Red wine

1 to 1 1/2 c sugar or 1 c honey-ish c honey, to taste

For a gallon of red wine add a cup to a cup and a half of sugar
for 'lords' or honey for 'comyn pepull' (sugar was more expensive
at the time). 

Warm the wine and add the sugar or honey and crush the
spices and add them to the sweetened wine. Allow to warm, covered, on the 
lowest flame you can manage for an hour or so (it could be done in a jar set 
in the sun as one recipe recommended!) although some recipes ask for real
cooking, I think a gentle warming gives the best effect. 

Remove from the heat and allow to cool. Place in a clean jar and cover.
It is bitter at first, after 48 hours all the bitterness is gone.
Store for a month to get the most flavor from the spices, even
though I may say some of the bitterness returns, (although some
recipes asked for only that 48 hours of storage). 

Best suggestion is taste every few days or so to see what you think. At this 
point remove the spices by straining or remove the bag. In the old
days it was done with a Hippocras sleeve which was a kind
of jelly bag.


From Coquinaria

May I say that the more esoteric spices can be purchased from:
Mountain Rose Herbs, My spice sage,  Kalyx for  true Spikenard


Spikenard   nardostachys jatamansi  NOT  aralia racemosa