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Apple Trifle
Take eight or nine fine apples. Stew them gently to a pulp, adding sugar according to taste, and flavouring with grated lemon-rind or cinnamon. When cold, place in a glass dish, and pour over them a good cold custard, made of the yolks of three eggs, one pint of milk, a little sugar, and a little sherry, simmered gently together and allowed to cool. Then take a pint of thick cream, warm it a little while over the fire with a little sugar, and another small glass of sherry. When cold, whisk it into froth, and as the froth rises, place it on a sieve to drain, and after it has stood some time (for no whip is solid that has not stood some hours), place it on the apple and custard in a rough, rocky form, and ornament with pink sugar, etc. Time for the whipped cream to stand, twelve hours. Probable cost, 2s. 6d., exclusive of the sherry. Sufficient for a moderate-sized dish.
A three-layer trifle with no sponge or biscuit in it — stewed apple, boiled custard, and a drained whip. The only difficult part is the custard, and the only slow part is the whip, which the recipe wants left overnight.
- The custard is the hingeThree yolks to a pint of milk is a thin, pourable custard with no starch to protect it, so it curdles the moment it simmers. Cook it in a bowl over barely trembling water, stirring, until it coats the back of a spoon — around 175-180F. "Simmered gently together" is the period's loose way of saying this; take it literally at your peril.
- ApplesCooking apples of the period were generally sharp and collapsed readily. Bramleys behave the same way; eight or nine of them comes to well over 2 lb peeled, so scale to the size of your dish. Dessert apples such as Gala hold their shape and will not give you the pulp asked for. Stew covered with a spoonful or two of water only.
- The drained whipBefore stabilised cream and powerful whisks, cooks whipped a sweetened, slightly warmed cream, skimmed the froth as it rose, and let it drain on a sieve over a bowl for hours so the liquid ran out and the foam set. Modern double cream (48% fat) whipped cold to soft peaks will hold perfectly well without the twelve-hour wait, though the drained version is drier and lighter.
- Warming the creamWarming cream "a little while over the fire" with sugar and sherry would at least have dissolved the sugar and blended the flavours; the recipe is explicit that it must be fully cold, ideally chilled, before whisking, or it will not whip properly.
- Sherry quantities"A little sherry" in the custard is roughly a tablespoon or two; "a small glass" for the cream is about 2 fl oz. Both are elastic. A medium or cream sherry suits the dish better than a fino.
- Pink sugarColoured sugar for decoration — granulated sugar tinted with cochineal, then a standard household colouring. Coloured sanding sugar is the direct equivalent; crushed ratafias or toasted flaked almonds are the other period finishes.
- Cost and yield2s. 6d. is a Victorian price with no modern equivalent. "A moderate-sized dish" is not defined any further in the recipe; the pint of milk and pint of cream are the only quantities to work from.
- AssemblyEvery layer must be cold before the next goes on, or the apple will thin the custard and the custard will melt the whip. Build it in a straight-sided glass bowl so the three bands show.
Trifle in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was often a layered dish crowned with whipped cream, a topping commonly linked to the syllabub, where sweetened cream and wine were whisked to a froth, skimmed off, and drained until the foam stood by itself. That draining step is spelled out here with unusual care. Fruit trifles built on stewed apple rather than cake do appear in English cookery of the period.