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Indian Trifle
Mix six ounces of rice flour with cold milk enough to make a thickish paste. Put a quart of new milk into a saucepan with the rind of a small lemon, and four ounces of sugar to sweeten. Simmer gently, to extract the lemon flavour (do this over a slow fire, and remove the rind as soon as the flavour is gained); add the rice and stir till the mixture leaves the sides of the pan. A few drops of the essence of ratafia or vanilla is a great improvement. If for a glass dish, let the trifle cool a little before turning out, and when quite firm and cold, cut out some of the rice, and introduce boiled custard into the space. This has a very good effect when some fancy device is shown. Cut an ounce of sweet almonds (blanched) into spikes, and stick them thickly over the top. Garnish the dish with any preserved fruit or pieces of fruit jelly of a rich bright colour. Time, a quarter of an hour to twenty minutes to simmer milk, a few minutes to boil the rice. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for one trifle.
This is a moulded ground-rice pudding dressed as a trifle, not the sponge-and-sherry kind. The whole thing hinges on cooking the rice flour long enough to set firm and taste clean.
- Rice flourWhat the book means is plain ground rice or rice flour milled from long-grain rice, not the glutinous rice flour sold for Asian sweets, which behaves quite differently. Six ounces is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons.
- A quart of new milkAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, or about 5 US cups. "New milk" is simply fresh whole milk, as opposed to milk that had stood and been skimmed.
- The hingeStir the slaked rice flour into the hot milk and keep stirring over low heat until the mass genuinely pulls away from the pan sides, which takes 8 to 10 minutes rather than the "few minutes" implied. Undercooked rice flour tastes raw and chalky and will not set firm enough to hold a cut cavity.
- Lemon rindPare it thinly with no white pith, and pull it out after five minutes or so of simmering. Left in, it turns bitter as the milk reduces.
- Ratafia essenceA Victorian almond-flavoured essence, closest today to almond extract. Use it sparingly -- the recipe says a few drops -- or it dominates; vanilla is the safer choice of the two the recipe offers.
- Turning outRinse the mould or glass dish with cold water first and do not grease it, or the surface will be greasy and dull. Chill until quite firm and cold, as the recipe directs, before cutting into it.
- The custard"Boiled custard" here is a stirred egg custard cooked to about 175F over low heat, never actually boiled, then cooled completely. Warm custard poured into the cavity will soften and slump the rice.
- Almond spikesBlanched almonds cut lengthwise into slivers with a small knife while still damp and soft; once dry they split. An ounce is roughly a scant quarter cup.
- Yield"Sufficient for one trifle" means a dish serving six to eight. The probable cost is given as one shilling.
Victorian cookery used "trifle" loosely for many layered or garnished cold sweets in a glass dish, and this one belongs to the blancmange and flummery family rather than to the sponge-and-sherry trifle that survives today. The "Indian" of the name is usually taken to point to the rice, which reached British kitchens in quantity through the East India trade; such names often carried no particular connection to any actual Indian dish. The technique is the same one used for cornflour and arrowroot shapes, which were valued in the period for being cheap, digestible and, above all, showy once turned out of a fancy mould and studded with almonds and bright preserved fruit.