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Peach Trifle
2 pounds of peaches 1 gill of water 4 ounces sugar Stale plain cake 1 gill cream Cut the peaches in halves, removing the stones, cook them with the sugar and water until tender, but not broken. Remove the center of the cake, being careful not to break it, leaving a wall about an inch and a quarter thick all around. Soak this with the syrup, and fill the corners with the fruit. Whip the cream with a teaspoon of sugar, and put around the top of the cake, leaving the fruit piled up in the center.
A shell of stale cake soaked in peach syrup and filled with the poached fruit — closer to a filled cake than the custard-and-sherry trifle most people expect. Two things decide whether it works: keeping the peach halves whole, and having a syrup thick enough to flavour the cake without turning it to paste.
- A gill is half a cupA gill is a small liquid measure -- 4 fl oz (1/2 cup) in American usage, 5 fl oz in imperial, so read the water and the cream as roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup each. Half a cup of cream whips to roughly a cup, which is just enough to band the top of a small cake; double it if you want a generous covering.
- Sugar by weightFour ounces of sugar is a generous 1/2 cup granulated. With 1/2 cup water that gives a light syrup rather than a heavy one, which is what you want for soaking.
- Poach, do not stewThe instruction "tender, but not broken" is the hinge. Bring the syrup to a bare simmer, slip in the halves cut side down, and give them 5 to 10 minutes depending on ripeness. Firm, barely-ripe freestone peaches hold their shape; a soft ripe peach will collapse into jam.
- SkinsThe recipe says nothing about peeling, and skins left on will loosen and slide off in the syrup. Blanch the peaches 30 seconds and slip the skins first if you want a clean look.
- Stale plain cakeThis means a firm, unfrosted butter cake, pound cake or Madeira cake, a day or two old. Fresh cake tears when you hollow it and dissolves when soaked; a light modern chiffon or box-mix sponge is too fragile to hold a wall. Cut the wall a full inch and a quarter thick as directed, and leave the base intact.
- Reduce the syrupAfter the fruit comes out, boil the syrup down by a third or so. Thin syrup runs straight through the cake and out onto the plate; a slightly thickened one clings. Spoon it on in stages and let each addition soak in.
- Assemble lateSoak the cake and pile the fruit up to a few hours ahead, but whip and apply the cream close to serving; whipped cream standing on wet fruit tends to slacken and weep.
- YieldDepending on the size of the cake, this should serve about six. It cuts in wedges and needs a spoon.
Trifle in English cookery began as something close to a fool -- cream flavoured and thickened -- and by the eighteenth century had settled into layers of soaked cake, wine, custard and whipped cream in a glass dish. What appears here is a leaner variant: no wine, no custard, no dish, just cake hollowed into a case and filled with poached fruit, a form that overlaps with what Victorian and Edwardian books also called a fruit charlotte or a gateau. The instruction to use stale plain cake points to the familiar household economy of finding a use for cake that has dried out.