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Banana Trifle
Butter a pie-dish and line it with slices of sponge cake; put a layer of sliced bananas on top, then some apricot jam; squeeze a little lemon juice over, then another layer of sponge-cake, cover with pieces of butter, and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour. When cold, serve with whipped cream.
A baked trifle rather than the assembled cold kind — closer to a bread-and-butter pudding built on sponge cake. It is simple enough that only a few things need translating.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is usually read today as somewhere around 340-360F (170-180C). Half an hour at that heat is enough to set the fruit and colour the top layer of sponge; cover loosely with foil if it browns before the time is up.
- Sponge cakeWhat is wanted is a plain, unfilled, unfrosted cake, preferably a day or two old: trifle sponges, plain sponge fingers, or a stale plain Madeira all work. A modern filled, frosted sponge will collapse into paste.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For a 1.5-pint pie dish, reckon on roughly 8 oz sponge cake, three bananas, 4-5 tablespoons apricot jam, the juice of half a lemon and about 1 oz butter dotted over the top.
- The lemon juice mattersIt is not only for flavour. Bananas darken quickly once cut and again in the oven, and the acid slows the browning while cutting the sweetness of the jam.
- Butter the dish and the topButtering the dish keeps the bottom layer of sponge from sticking; the pieces of butter on the upper layer help it crisp and colour. The recipe calls for both, so do both.
- Warm the jamApricot jam spread cold will tear the sponge. Loosen it with a spoonful of hot water or a few seconds' heat so it spreads and then soaks in.
- ServingIt is explicitly served cold ("When cold, serve with whipped cream"), and it needs the full cooling time to set. Whipped cream is the stated accompaniment; the recipe does not say whether it should be sweetened. The quantity above serves four to six.
Trifle in the nineteenth century is generally said to have covered a much wider field than the layered sherry-and-custard dish that now owns the name: any assembly of sponge, fruit, preserve and cream could carry the title, and baked versions like this one seem to have sat comfortably alongside the cold. What dates the recipe is the banana itself. Cassell's was compiled at the point when faster steam shipping was beginning to put bananas on British tables in quantity for the first time, moving them from a curiosity of the wealthy conservatory to something a middle-class cook might buy and use up in a pudding. Apricot jam is often described as the standard glazing and layering preserve of the period, chosen not to muddy other flavours — and it appears throughout Victorian sweet cookery, most likely for exactly that reason. The dish is also, quietly, a way of using stale cake, which is the thread running through a great many puddings in books of this kind.