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Trifle
Fill a glass bowl with a layer of sponge cake. Cover with red currant jelly or raspberry jam, then add more cake.
Sprinkle over this a handful of shredded cocoanut and ½ cup chopped nuts. Pour over all a custard made of 1 pint milk, 2 eggs, 2 tablespoons sugar. Boil custard till it thickens, and add a pinch of salt and vanilla. When cold serve with whipped cream -N. Hampson, Mount Forest, Ont. 1
A contributor's trifle, stripped to its essentials — cake, jam, custard, cream. The only real technique is the custard, and the instruction as written will curdle it if taken literally.
- Do not boil the custardA stirred custard of 1 pint milk and 2 eggs sets at about 170-175F and scrambles above roughly 180F. Cook it in a heavy pan or double boiler over low heat, stirring constantly, until it coats the back of a spoon, then pour it into a cool bowl at once. "Boil till it thickens" here most likely means cooking to the scalding heat of a double boiler rather than a rolling boil.
- Custard consistencyTwo eggs to a pint of milk gives a thin pouring custard that will soak the cake rather than set on it. If you want it to hold a spoon, use four yolks, or add a teaspoon of cornstarch slaked in cold milk, which also buffers the eggs against curdling.
- Stale cake is correctCake -- the recipe does not specify, but day-old sponge absorbs the jam and custard better than very fresh cake, which can go pasty. Split the layers thin so the jam sits between sheets rather than in pockets.
- CocoanutThe book means dried shredded coconut. Both sweetened and unsweetened commercial coconut were on the market by this period, so which was meant is uncertain; unsweetened desiccated or flaked coconut is the drier match, and a few minutes in a dry pan wakes up the flavour.
- Chilling"When cold" means thoroughly cold: several hours in the refrigerator, so the custard sets and the cake takes up the jam. Add the whipped cream just before serving or it weeps.
- The missing sherryEnglish trifle soaks the cake in sherry or a fortified wine. This version leaves it out entirely, which is why the jam and jelly carry all the moisture. A few tablespoons of sherry brushed on the cake layers returns it to the older form.
- Vessel and yieldA 2-quart glass bowl suits these quantities; the recipe gives no yield. Glass is specified for a reason: the layers are the point, so build them level and against the sides.
Trifle is an English dessert of long standing — the name appears in sixteenth-century English cookery for a sweetened thickened cream, and the layered cake-and-custard form familiar today was well established by the eighteenth century, when it typically included sponge or biscuits soaked in sack or sherry. This Canadian version, sent in by a reader in Mount Forest, Ontario, to the Five Roses Cook Book — a promotional collection published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and built largely from recipes submitted by housewives who used the flour — is a dry-goods trifle: currant jelly or raspberry jam, shredded coconut and chopped nuts do the work that wine once did. Coconut was a marker of a well-stocked early twentieth-century pantry, cheap and shelf-stable by then thanks to commercial desiccating, and it is often said to turn up in Canadian and American cakes and puddings of the period more readily than in their English models.