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Plum Trifle
Cut damson plums in half, and cook until tender in a little syrup; drain, and rub the pulp through a coarse sieve. To a cup of the pulp when cold add the stiffly whipped whites of four eggs. Fill glass custard cups half full of vanilla custard, and when very cold, put a large spoon of the trifle on top, heaping it up roughly. Serve very cold.-Mary Foster Snider.
The trifle here is not the layered sponge pudding but a fruit-and-egg-white foam, and it is folded together raw and served cold with no further cooking. That is the sticking point.
- The whites are never cookedFour stiffly whipped egg whites are folded into cold plum pulp and spooned onto already-chilled custard. Nothing in the finished dish reaches a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and the dessert then sits cold, uncooked, for as long as it takes to serve. Use a current recipe for a fruit fool or snow if you want this effect.
- Why the period cook was untroubledUncooked whites in snows, whips and floating islands were common in American cookery of this period. Modern shell eggs travel through a longer supply chain, which is one reason the same technique is now treated differently.
- Damson plumsSmall, oval, blue-black and sharply acid — a cooking plum, not a dessert one. They appear in late summer at farm markets and rarely in supermarkets. Their acidity is the whole point of the dish; a sweet red plum gives a flat, cloying pulp.
- "A little syrup"Unspecified, as often in recipes of this kind: a light sugar syrup, used in just enough depth to keep the fruit from catching. The plums are drained afterwards, so the syrup serves mainly as a poaching medium rather than a sweetener.
- Rubbing through a coarse sieveThis removes the skins while leaving the pulp with some texture. A food mill does the same work; a blender will purée the skins in as well.
- Glass custard cupsSmall footed or straight-sided glasses, perhaps 4 to 6 fl oz; the quantities as written would fill several of them.
- "Vanilla custard"Most likely an egg-thickened stirred custard rather than a baked one or a cornstarch pudding; the recipe treats it as knowledge the reader already has.
"Trifle" in nineteenth-century American usage could cover more than the sherry-soaked sponge dish of English tradition; light, heaped, cold confections of fruit with whipped cream or beaten whites sometimes carried the name. This one belongs to the same group as snows and whips, which depend on beaten egg white for volume without ice or gelatine. Damsons are an old English cooking plum, the name generally traced to Damascus by way of the Latin prunum damascenum, and they were widely planted in American dooryards and hedgerows for preserves because they were too tart to eat out of hand. The recipe is credited to Mary Foster Snider, and the quantities are conversational rather than exact.