Home › The Principles of Cookery › Trifle
Trifle
This is a compound of syllabub and sweet-meats. Line the bottom of a glass trifle-dish with sponge biscuits stuck with blanched almonds; moisten them with sweet wine, or with sherry and sugar. Over these lay a dozen ratafia cakes dipped in noyeau. Intersperse with these some thin slices of citron and orange peel, and distribute over these pieces of apricot and raspberry jam with currant jelly. Pour over these a few spoonfuls of the liquor of the syllabub. The next layer should consist of tartlet cream of about the thickness of an inch, over which grate some nutmeg, and strew a little powdered cinnamon, together with a small quantity of lemon-peel, and some powdered loaf sugar. Lastly, take the whipped froth from the sieve, and put it on the top as abundantly as the dish will allow. To give it a pleasing appearance, strew various coloured comfits over the froth. The tartlet cream to form one of the layers may be made as follows. Mix together half a pint of cream and the same quantity of milk; put into it a piece of fresh lemon or Seville orange-peel, and a little cinnamon, and sweeten with loaf sugar. Let these ingredients boil about ten minutes. Have ready prepared in another pan the yolks of six eggs well-beaten up with a heaped tea-spoonful of fine flour; to these gradually strain the boiled cream and milk, and then whisk them well together over a gentle fire, so that they may acquire the proper consistency without curdling. If cream is not available, milk only may be employed, but in that case a little more flour will be required.
An assembly recipe from the era when a trifle was still built on syllabub rather than jelly and whipped cream. The instructions assume you have already made a syllabub and drained its froth, which is the part most likely to trip up a modern cook.
- The froth from the sieveThe recipe presumes a whisked syllabub: sweet wine, sugar, lemon and cream whipped together, the foam lifted onto a fine sieve set over a bowl and left several hours to drain. The drained liquid is the "liquor of the syllabub" poured over the sponge; the stiff foam left on the sieve is the topping. Without that step nothing later in the recipe makes sense.
- Sponge biscuits and ratafiasSponge biscuits are savoiardi or ladyfingers. Ratafia cakes are small crisp almond macaroons, roughly the size of a hazelnut; amaretti are the closest thing on a supermarket shelf.
- NoyeauNoyau (also noyeau) is a sweetened liqueur flavoured with fruit kernels, historically apricot or bitter-almond stones. Modern bottlings such as crème de noyaux are made to food-safe standards; do not attempt a period kernel infusion at home. Amaretto substitutes cleanly.
- CitronCandied citron peel, thin-sliced, not lemon and not citronella. Mixed candied peel will do at the cost of some perfume.
- Loaf sugarSugar sold in a cone and broken or rasped as needed. Granulated is the equivalent; where the recipe says "powdered loaf sugar" use caster or icing sugar.
- Tartlet creamThis is a thin crème pâtissière: half a pint of cream with half a pint of milk is 10 fl oz each in imperial measure, near enough 1¼ cups of each. Six yolks and a heaped teaspoon of flour for that volume gives a pourable custard, not a pipeable one.
- The hinge: cook the custard low"Whisk them well together over a gentle fire" is the whole game. Strain the hot dairy into the yolks in a thin stream, then bring the mixture back over low heat, or over a bain-marie if you would rather not watch it, and stop as soon as it coats a spoon at around 175-180F. The flour buys some insurance but not much at this ratio.
- ComfitsHard sugar-shelled seeds or nuts, coloured. Nonpareils or sugared caraway comfits give the period look; hundreds and thousands are the modern shorthand.
- Assembly and yieldBuild it in a straight-sided glass bowl so the layers show, and let it stand cold for several hours before serving so the sponge takes up the wine. Add the froth only at the last moment, as it slackens. The recipe gives no yield; the quantities specified for the cream layer alone suggest a dish of around two quarts.
The name records the dish's original standing: a trifle was something of no consequence, and the earliest English references in the sixteenth century describe little more than sweetened thick cream. Sponge, wine and jam accumulated over the following two hundred years, and by the Georgian period one common finish was a syllabub, whose froth was skimmed off and drained on a sieve while the wine-and-cream liquid beneath was poured over the biscuit base. Cassell's is describing that older construction, crowned with drained syllabub froth rather than the plain whipped cream of the later Victorian version. The layer of candied citron, ratafias and noyau also marks it as a company dish.