An Easy, Elegant Dessert

Need a simple dessert for a dinner party?  Try syllabub!  It's very easy to make, but feels very fancy.  Everyone will be impressed.  There are about fifty different syllabub recipes, but my favorite is a mix of white wine, cream, lemon juice, and sugar.

Again, I'm not great with exact modern measurements since that's not really our thing in the eighteenth-century kitchens, but to make enough for four I would suggest that you take about one and one-half cups of white wine, two and one-half cups of cream, two lemons, and sweeten it to your palate (I like maybe 1/2 or 3/4 cups of sugar?  Test it for yourself). Then get out a large mixing bowl.  Juice the lemons into it and grate a bit of the peel into it, too.  Then add your wine and sugar and mix until the sugar has dissolved.  Then pour in your cream and whip it until it's of a whipped cream consistency.  Pour into shrub glasses (or any kind of clear glass-- a champagne flute, perhaps), and after a couple of hours the wine and cream will separate from each other.  On top you will have a light, sweet, lemony whipped cream froth to eat, and underneath a wine punch to drink.  Enjoy!

Note: don't whip it too long or it turns into butter, as I found out the hard way.  If you do turn it into butter, it goes well on bread.  Syllabutter!