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Peach Trifle
Boil together for five minutes 1 scant cupful of sugar and 1 cupful of water, dropping into it, as fast as stoned, the pits from 1 quart of ripe peaches. Keep the stones in the syrup for ten minutes, drawing the saucepan to the side of the fire. Skim them out and lay in the pared peaches, stewing slowly until they are tender.
Set aside until the first heat has passed off, then press through a sieve. Line a glass dish with stale sponge cakes dipped in sherry, spread over them the cold peach pulp and cover with 1½ cupfuls of thick cream sweetened and flavored with 2 tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar and ½ of a teaspoonful of vanilla and whipped to a thick solid froth.
A simple layered trifle with no custard and no baking — the only cooking is a peach compote, and the whole thing depends on the fruit being ripe. Assemble it several hours ahead so the sponge softens.
- The peach stonesSteeping the pits in syrup was one period way of pulling a faint almond note out of the kernel. Peach kernels contain cyanogenic compounds, so leave the stones whole and unbroken if you do it at all, and never crack them for the seed inside. Skipping the step entirely costs the dish very little; a drop of almond extract in the syrup gives a similar effect.
- "Scant cupful"Slightly under a level cup — around 6 1/2 oz of sugar. With genuinely ripe peaches you can go lower still, since the pulp is later sweetened again in the cream.
- The cream measureThe printed page gives 1½ cupfuls of thick cream, as our text now reads. Heavy cream whips to roughly double its volume, so that yields about 3 cups, enough to blanket a medium glass dish.
- "Drawing the saucepan to the side of the fire"On a coal range this meant moving off the hot plate to a cooler zone. Modern equivalent: take the pan off the heat entirely, or set it on the lowest burner setting so the syrup stays hot without simmering.
- Stewing the peachesPared, halved ripe peaches need 8 to 12 minutes at a bare simmer, not longer — they should collapse under a spoon but not turn to jam. Firm supermarket fruit may need 15 to 20.
- Pressing through a sieveA food mill or a fine sieve and a stiff rubber spatula both work; a blender makes the pulp too thin and foamy to hold a layer. Cool the purée completely before it touches the sponge or it will soak straight through and slacken the cream.
- Stale sponge cakesLadyfingers or day-old plain sponge cut into fingers. They need to be dry enough to absorb sherry without disintegrating — fresh soft cake turns to paste. Dip briefly on one side rather than soaking.
- Yield and holdingServes about six, depending on the size of the dish. Chill at least two hours and eat the same day; whipped cream slackens and weeps on standing.
Trifle in nineteenth-century American cookbooks had already drifted well away from the English original, which was built on a boiled custard poured over wine-soaked sponge. What survived the crossing was the structure — stale cake, spirits, something soft, cream on top. This version shows it: no eggs, no custard-making, no baking, and the fruit stretched by cake and cream rather than served whole. The syrup steeped with peach stones reflects a habit common in the period, when cooks routinely used pits and kernels of stone fruit for an almond flavor before commercial extracts were cheap and ubiquitous; peach-leaf and peach-kernel flavorings appear throughout Victorian dessert chapters for the same reason.