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Bread, Tipsy
Cut a French roll into thin slices, and pare off the crusts, leaving it a nice round shape; spread raspberry, strawberry, or currant jam over each slice, and pile them one on the other in a glass dish. Pour over them as much sherry as the bread will absorb. Ornament it round with blanched almonds cut into very fine strips, and stick them also on the top; pour a custard round and serve. This is a quickly-prepared and cheap dish. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A trifle in miniature, assembled rather than cooked, with the custard the only component that needs any real attention. The whole thing stands or falls on how much sherry the bread will take without collapsing.
- The French rollIn Victorian usage a French roll is a small, light white bread roll with a soft, open crumb, not a baguette. A brioche-free bakery dinner roll or a soft white bun works; slightly stale bread absorbs sherry better than fresh and holds its shape when stacked.
- "As much sherry as the bread will absorb"Pour it on in stages and let each addition soak in before adding more, roughly 2-4 tablespoons per roll depending on staleness. Flooding the dish at once gives you sodden bread sitting in a puddle rather than a saturated tower. A medium sherry such as amontillado suits it better than a dry fino.
- The custardNone is specified in the recipe; a pouring custard of egg yolks, milk or cream, and sugar, cooked gently to about 175-180F until it coats the back of a spoon, then cooled, is what is meant. Something in the region of a pint (2 cups) will surround a dish of this size. Do not use a set baked custard.
- Blanched almondsWhole almonds dropped into boiling water for a minute slip out of their skins, after which they can be sliced lengthways into fine spikes while still damp and pliable. Dry almonds shatter. Commercial flaked almonds are a reasonable substitute for the border but too flimsy to stand upright on top.
- Assembly and timingBuild it in a shallow glass dish so the layers show. The recipe has you pour the custard round and serve at once; a period cold in the dish will let the sherry distribute and the jam soften if you have the time. It does not keep well past the same day, as the bread eventually breaks down.
- Cost and yieldThe 1s. 3d. is the original English price, useful only as a signal that this was considered an economical sweet. The stated four or five servings is generous for the slices of a single roll, so expect small portions.
Tipsy bread belongs to the large English family of sherry-soaked puddings that runs from tipsy cake and tipsy parson through to the trifle, all of them built on the same idea: stale sponge or bread, spirit or fortified wine, jam or fruit, and custard. The trifle proper wanted a sponge cake and often a jelly beneath it; this version substitutes a plain roll and skips the whipped syllabub topping, and Cassell's flags it as "quickly-prepared and cheap." The spiked almonds are the fossil of an older habit - eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tipsy cakes were often stuck all over with blanched almond spikes, traditionally said to give the dish the look of a hedgehog. Its presence in a general dictionary of cookery marks it as a standby for households that wanted the look of a company dessert without the cost of a baked sponge.