Plum Trifle
Cook plums slowly till soft when rub through sieve and let cool. To each cup of pulp add the whites of three eggs beaten stiff and a little sugar. Drop a spoonful of this on cups two-thirds full of a simple custard, letting the fruit meringue heap up well. Serve cold.
The construction is straightforward — sieved plum pulp lightened with beaten egg white, spooned over custard — but the meringue here is never cooked, and that is the reason this one belongs on the page as a historical document rather than as dessert.
- The uncooked whites are the problemThree raw whites per cup of pulp are folded into cooled fruit, heaped on cold custard, and served without any further heat. Nothing in the method takes the egg above room temperature, so any Salmonella present in the shell egg survives intact, and the cold, sweet, low-acid custard beneath it sits in the bacterial growth range for as long as the dish is on the table. If you want a fruit-fool or trifle of this shape, work from a current recipe.
- "A simple custard"Most likely a stirred pouring custard rather than the baked, set custard of a modern trifle base, though the recipe never says. It was evidently taken as assumed knowledge, and no quantities for it are given.
- Rub through sieveCooked slowly, the plums release their own juice; the sieve is there to strip skins and the stubborn fibre around the stone. A food mill or a fine drum sieve does the same work. Damsons and other clingstone plums are far more trouble here than freestone varieties.
- Quantities are openNo weight of plums, no measure of sugar, no number of cups. As a rough modern guide, something like 1 lb of stoned plums will cook down to about a cup of thick pulp, but the recipe gives no scale of its own, and "a little sugar" depends entirely on how sour the fruit is.
- Cups, not a trifle bowlThis is served in individual cups two-thirds full, with the fruit meringue standing above the rim — closer to a portioned syllabub or fool than to the layered sponge-and-cream trifle the word now suggests.
"Trifle" in English cookery has never meant one fixed thing; the word covered almost any light, spooned, cream-or-custard dessert, and books like this used it loosely for anything whipped and heaped. The particular trick here — sieved fruit pulp folded into stiff whites — is the same idea as an apple or damson snow, a dish common in nineteenth-century household books because it stretched a small quantity of sharp fruit a long way.