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Trifle, Ground Rice
Sweeten a quart of milk, and flavour with lemon or any other suitable flavouring. Put it into a saucepan, and stir into it five heaped table-spoonfuls of ground rice which has been mixed to a smooth paste with a little cold milk. Let the mixture boil gently for five or six minutes, stirring all the time, and pour it into a basin until slightly cooled. Place a jelly-pot in the middle of a glass dish, pour the ground rice round it, and let it get cold and stiff. Just before serving the rice, remove the jelly-pot, and in its place put half a pint of good cold custard. Stick blanched and sliced almonds all over the trifle, and garnish with bright fruit jelly. If liked, the appearance of the dish may be varied by pouring the rice into a glass dish, and when it is cold and stiff cutting it out into the shape of a star, a diamond, or any other design, then removing the spare rice and filling the spaces it occupied with custard. Time, four or five hours to stiffen. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A moulded milk pudding dressed up as a trifle: no sponge, no sherry, just set ground rice with a well of custard in the middle. Almost everything hinges on cooking the rice long enough that it does not taste raw.
- Cook the rice properlyFive or six minutes is the minimum, and with modern finely milled rice flour it is often not enough — undercooked it stays chalky on the tongue. Keep it at a gentle boil, stirring, for eight to ten minutes until it thickens and loses any floury taste.
- Ground riceSold today as rice flour or ground rice; the coarser "ground rice" grade gives a slightly grainy pudding closer to the original, the fine flour a smoother one. Cream of Rice works as well. Slake it with cold milk to a paste first, as directed, or it will lump.
- Imperial measuresA quart is 40 fl oz, so about 5 US cups of milk; half a pint of custard is 10 fl oz, about 1 atd cups. Five heaped tablespoons is imprecise atr to 4 atd oz (100-130 g) of ground rice for that quantity of milk, and expect a firm set.
- The jelly-potA jelly-pot is a small straight-sided stoneware or glass jam jar, used here purely as a former to leave a hollow. Any straight-sided glass or tin of similar size does the job; oil or wet the outside lightly so it lifts away cleanly.
- Flavouring"Lemon" here most likely means pared zest infused in the warming milk and then strained out, or a few drops of essence; avoid the juice, whose acid can curdle milk. Bay leaf, vanilla pod or a strip of orange peel all suit the same treatment.
- The custardUse a proper pouring custard — egg yolks, sugar and milk cooked to about 175-180F (80C) — and chill it thoroughly before it goes in. Warm custard will soften the walls of the rice and slump.
- Setting timeFour or five hours is realistic in a cool larder; in the refrigerator two to three hours is usually sufficient. It must be cold right through before the jar is removed or the sides will collapse.
- Garnish and yield"Bright fruit jelly" means a clear, brightly coloured preserve atnt or crab-apple would suit atd or piped round in dots. Serves four to five as written; the 1s. cost is a late-Victorian price, not a guide to anything now.
Trifle began in the sixteenth century as something much simpler than the layered dessert we know — a sweetened, flavoured cream, close to a fool — and only gathered its sponge, sherry, jam and custard over the following two hundred years. By the time Cassell's was compiled the word had stretched wide enough to cover any dish of that family, including thrifty nursery versions like this one, which contains no cake, no wine and no alcohol at all. What it does show is the Victorian passion for moulded milk puddings: ground rice, sago, semolina and cornflour were all boiled thick, set in shapes, turned out and decorated, so that a few pence of milk and starch could be presented at table as something ornamental. The instruction to cut the set rice into a star or a diamond and fill the gap with custard belongs to that same impulse — the cheapest ingredients in the house arranged to look deliberate.