Exclusive Excerpt – Warrior’s Surrender:

Later, Heloise watched Rosalind pass up the stairs and round the corner to the guest chambers just as she reached the landing on the Great Hall. Heloise stopped to warm her hands by the fire. She did not notice Sebastian until he spoke to her.

“There you are! You’ll miss out on the dances standing here by yourself,” he told her.

She blushed. Sebastian swept her hands into his. “Your hands are freezing!”

His notice of her discomforted rather than flattered.

“I know where you’ve been,” he announced.

Heloise jumped. She worked to prise the tongue from the roof of her mouth.

“You do?” she exclaimed, eyes darting for the door.

Sebastian grinned and folded her arm through his and led her towards the knot of dancers.

“You’ve been down in the kitchen pestering the cook for a taste of the syllabub, haven’t you?”

Investigating medieval desserts has been fun and one of the most delicious is syllabub.

A modern syllabub

There first written references and the earliest references date back to the 1500s, so I might get accused of some historical inaccuracy here but I will say in my defence that just because we can’t find an earlier reference it doesn’t mean the dish wasn’t known before that date.

So there.

Depending on how it is made, syllabub could be drunk as a drink or eaten as a dessert with a spoon, while lemon is popular variations include berry, champagne, amaretto, ginger and Turkish Delight. According to this keen food historian syllabub is like an alcoholic whipped cream that could keep its shape when placed in ring moulds. Yum!

Another syllabub, older in origin than the solid kind, was the whip or whipped syllabub. If the very large number of surviving recipes is anything to go by, it seems to have been very popular, This was very different in nature to solid syllabub. It does not really seem to be understood by modern cooks. The cream/wine mixture was whipped in a large bowl, usually with a birch whisk… As the bubbles rose they were skimmed off the surface and put on a sieve to drain overnight.

It is the blending of an acid, like lemon, to milk to lightly curdle which helps give syllabub its structure.

Here’s an easy modern recipe I love from the BBC’s Good Food web site.

Lemon Syllabub