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Lord Mayor's Trifle
Slice four penny spongecakes and lay them at the bottom of a deep trifle-dish. Put with them a dozen ratafias, eight macaroons, and two wine-glassfuls of brandy. When the liquor is soaked up, spread a layer of strawberry or raspberry jam over the spongecakes, and cover them with a pint of rich cold custard. Pile whipped cream high over the top, and ornament with pink comfits. The cream should be whipped some hours before it is needed, and laid upon a reversed sieve to drain. Time, about an hour to whip the cream. Probable cost, exclusive of the brandy, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A layered trifle of the old school: no jelly, no fruit beyond the jam, and a great deal of cream. Most of the work is in the cream, which needs to be whipped and drained well ahead so it will hold its height.
- Drain the cream firstThe instruction to whip the cream hours ahead and drain it on an upturned sieve is the hinge of the dish. Whipped double or heavy cream (36% fat or more) weeps a surprising amount of liquid; draining it off means the piled cream keeps its shape on the dish rather than sliding into the custard.
- Whipping time"About an hour" assumes a hand whisk and a cool larder. With a mixer you are looking at two to four minutes to soft-to-firm peaks. Stop while the cream still folds; overwhipped cream will not pile smoothly.
- Penny spongecakesSmall individual sponge cakes sold singly for a penny; their exact size is not recorded. Trimmed sponge cake, savoiardi or boudoir biscuits stand in well.
- Ratafias and macaroonsRatafias were tiny almond-flavoured biscuits, close to today's small amaretti; the macaroons meant are almond macaroons, not the coconut sort. Both are there for almond bitterness against the jam, so choose almond over coconut.
- Wine-glassfulsA Victorian wine-glass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so two glassfuls of brandy is roughly 4 fl oz (half a cup). Pour it over the biscuits gradually and wait for it to soak in before the jam goes on.
- A pint of custardAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, not 16. Make a proper egg-yolk custard (crème anglaise), cook it to about 175F so it thickens, then chill it thoroughly. Warm custard will melt the cream layer above it.
- Pink comfitsSugar-coated seeds or tiny sugar-shelled sweets, used purely as ornament. Sugar pearls, nonpareils or crystallised rose petals give the same effect.
- Cost and yield3s. 6d. is a price note for a Victorian household, not a measurement. The stated eight to ten servings is accurate for a deep glass bowl; the dish is rich enough that portions can be small.
Trifle in this form — liquor-soaked sponge, jam, custard, whipped cream — is generally traced to eighteenth-century English cookery, and had settled into something like a fixed sequence of layers by the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s and 80s. The "Lord Mayor's" title is often said to belong to a whole family of Victorian recipe names that borrowed civic or aristocratic grandeur to signal expense: brandy rather than sherry, macaroons and ratafias rather than plain sponge, and cream piled high and ornamented rather than simply spooned over. A trifle is in any case a teaching dish, assembling three separately made components — sponge, custard and whipped cream — into one bowl. The instruction to whip cream some hours ahead and drain it on a reversed sieve is a useful reminder that Victorian kitchens had no refrigeration; a cream that would hold overnight in a cool larder was worth the hour of wrist work.