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Orange Trifle
1½ cups orange juice cup lemon juice grated rind of one orange whip from two and one half cups cream Soak gelatine in cold water; dissolve in boiling water. Add sugar, fruit rind, and juice, and the whip from cream. Decorate a melon mold with sections of oranges. Pour in trifle mixture. Chill, cool, remove from mold, garnish with orange jelly and beaten and sweetened cream. Peach Gâteau Scoop out center of a round sponge cake; fill with fresh peaches, sweetened and cut in pieces. Cover with beaten and sweetened cream, put on with a pastry bag and tube. Garnish with small pieces of peaches. 2 cups cream 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 cup sugar
A moulded gelatine cream in the Edwardian style, set in a melon mould and lined with orange sections. The surviving text gives no gelatine quantity, so treat the proportions below as guidance rather than the book's own.
- Gelatine, the missing numberThe amount of gelatine and the soaking and dissolving water are not stated in this text (the lemon juice quantity has dropped out too). For the roughly two cups of juice here, plus the soaking and dissolving water, modern practice is about 2 tablespoons (2 envelopes) powdered gelatine, softened in 1/2 cup cold water and dissolved in 1/2 cup boiling water.
- Order of operationsThe hinge is temperature. The dissolved gelatine mixture must be cooled to the point where it just begins to thicken before the whipped cream goes in; add it warm and the cream deflates and the trifle separates into a clear jelly layer with foam on top.
- "Whip from cream"An old distinction: cream was whipped and the stiff froth skimmed off the top with a skimmer, the unwhipped remainder left behind. With modern pasteurised heavy cream, simply whip 2 1/2 cups to soft peaks and use all of it.
- Citrus acid1 1/2 cups orange juice plus lemon juice is a strongly acidic base. Acid weakens gelatine slightly, which is another reason not to be sparing with it.
- Melon mouldAn oval mould, commonly fluted; sizes vary. Any bowl or similarly shaped mould of comparable volume works. Rinse it with cold water before lining it with orange sections so they stay put.
- UnmouldingChill at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. Dip the mould in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled plate rather than trying to loosen the edges with a knife, which tears the citrus decoration.
- Orange jelly garnishThe book assumes you have a separate pan of set orange jelly to chop for the border. A simple sweetened orange juice set with gelatine, cut into cubes, does the job.
- YieldAbout 8 servings, depending on the size of the mould.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, belongs to the Boston Cooking School tradition, and its dessert chapter is full of moulded creams like this one: gelatine, fruit juice and whipped cream turned out of a fancy tin and ringed with chopped jelly. Commercial granulated gelatine, sold in measured envelopes from the late nineteenth century onward, made such dishes easier in ordinary households that had no calf's foot to boil down, and the ice-cooled refrigerator made them reliable. The word trifle here seems to have drifted some way from the English original of sponge, wine and custard in a glass bowl; American cookbooks of this period appear at times to have used it loosely for light, cold, cream-based sweets.