Turkish Syllabub Recipe | Food

Date Published:: 09/10/2007

This Nigella recipe is taken from her popular Channel 4 series Nigella Bites, based on her popular book How To Eat.

This hasn't got the temple-aching sweetness of Turkish Delight, nor its palate-cleaving glutinousness, but rather it is a cloud-light spoon-pudding version which attempts to catch its aromatic essence - perfect after the lamb and pomegranate salad. That it requires no cooking, merely some pouring and whisking doesn't hurt either.

The quantities below make enough syllabub to fill, billowingly, eight 150-ml glasses; I give spoon measures before metric ones, just because it makes the whole operation more relaxed if you dispense with weighing and measuring. The vague amount of cream specified is just meant to indicate one of those old-pint tubs which hasn't been properly made metric, and therefore is a strange measurement.

Ingredients

12 tablespoons (approx 175ml) Cointreau
juice of 2 lemons
8 tablespoons (approx 125g) caster sugar
just under 600ml double cream
2 tablespoons rosewater
2 tablespoons orange flower water
2 tablespoons pistacchios finely chopped

Method: How to cook Turkish syllabub

1.Combine the Cointreau, lemon juice and sugar in a large bowl (I use the bowl of my KitchenAid mixer) and stir to dissolve the sugar, or as good as. Slowly stir in the cream then get whisking. As I said, I use my freestanding mixer for this, but if you haven't got one, don't worry - but I would then advise a hand- held electric mixer. This takes ages to thicken and doing it by hand will drive you demented with tedium and impatience. Or it would me.

2.When the cream's fairly thick, but still not thick enough to hold its shape, dribble in the flower waters and then keep whisking until you have a creamy mixture that's light and airy but able to form soft peaks. I always think of syllabub as occupying some notional territory between solid and liquid; you're aiming, as you whisk, for what Jane Grigson called 'bulky whiteness'. Whatever: better slightly too runny than slightly too thick, so proceed carefully, but don't get anxious about it.

3.Spoon the syllabub in airy dollops into small glasses, letting the mixture billow up above the rim of the glass, and scatter finely chopped pistacchios on top. In How to Eat, there's a recipe for pistacchio crescents which would be fabulous dunked into and eaten with this. But only if you feel like it: the cool, fool-like smoothness of this is perfect as it is.