Tipsy Squire
Fill a baking dish with sliced sponge cake, saturate with wine. Pour over it a rich boiled custard, set on the stove and let it remain ten or fifteen minutes. Make an icing out of the whites of the eggs, cover the top and let it brown. Serve cold with whipped cream.
A trifle by another name, written for a cook who already knew how to make boiled custard and needed only the assembly order. The quantities are entirely left to you, so the proportions below are the useful part.
- The hinge: keep the custard below a simmerA "rich boiled custard" is a stirred custard, never actually boiled. Cook egg yolks, milk or cream and sugar over low heat or a water bath, stirring, until it coats a spoon at about 175-180F. Past that it scrambles and no amount of whisking brings it back.
- Working quantitiesFor a 2-quart baking dish: about 12 oz sponge cake, 3/4 to 1 cup wine, and a custard of 4 cups milk or half cream, 6 egg yolks and 1/2 cup sugar. The yolks leave you 6 whites, which is exactly what the meringue calls for.
- What wineNineteenth-century tipsy cakes meant sherry, madeira or sweet white wine. Cream sherry or madeira suits it best; a dry table wine turns the cake sour rather than rich.
- Stale cake soaks betterDay-old or two-day-old sponge absorbs wine and custard without collapsing into paste. Fresh, moist cake goes to slurry.
- "Set on the stove" ten or fifteen minutesThe original gives no temperature; most likely this means the cooler back of a range or a warming oven, just to let the custard settle into the cake. In a modern kitchen a low oven, around 300F, uncovered, will approximate that quarter hour.
- The icing is a meringueBeat the 6 whites to soft peaks with about 3/4 cup sugar, spread to the very edges of the dish so it seals against the rim, and brown at 400F for 6-8 minutes, or 350F for 15 if you want the interior of the meringue set through.
- Serve cold means properly coldChill at least four hours, and refrigerate rather than leaving it standing at room temperature — this is a custard dish. Meringue weeps after a day, so brown it the day it is served.
- YieldA 2-quart dish gives 8 to 10 servings. The whipped cream is served alongside, not folded in.
"Tipsy squire" is one of a family of names — tipsy cake, tipsy parson — for wine-soaked sponge under custard, close kin to the English trifle. The clerical and gentry nicknames are generally explained as a joke about the visiting parson or squire who was fed rather more sherry than he realized; the explanation is traditional rather than documented, but the names do appear in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, tipsy parson especially in Southern ones. The older English tipsy cake used a whole sponge stuck with blanched almonds and stood in a pool of wine; the sliced-and-layered version here is the simpler household form. It is in any case a make-ahead dish that could be assembled from leftover cake and the eggs and milk a household already had, dressed up with a meringue lid to look like a company dessert.