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Swiss Cream or Trifle
1008. Grate the rind of a lemon into a pint of cream (first taking from the cream as much as will mix four tea-spoonfuls of ground rice to a smooth batter), add a small piece of cinnamon, sweeten with six ounces of loaf sugar, place it over a clear fire or hot hearth; when it
A stirred cream thickened with ground rice rather than eggs, in the older sense of "trifle" as a flavoured cream set in a dish. The legible portion covers the flavouring and the thickening, which is where the dish is won or lost.
- Slake the rice firstThe instruction in parentheses is the hinge: lift a few spoonfuls of the cold cream out and work the ground rice into it until perfectly smooth before the rest is heated. Ground rice tipped dry into hot cream sets into lumps that no amount of beating will disperse.
- Ground riceThis is rice ground coarser than rice flour, roughly semolina-like in texture. Modern rice flour can stand in; four teaspoons to a pint gives a pourable cream, not a moulded shape.
- A pint of creamIf the pint is imperial it is 20 fl oz, roughly 2 1/3 US cups; an American pint would be 16 fl oz. Single cream, or a mix of whipping cream and whole milk, suits the dish well.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar broken from a cone; ordinary granulated is the direct equivalent. Six ounces to a pint is very sweet by current taste, and 3 to 4 oz is usually enough.
- A clear fire or hot hearthBoth mean steady, gentle heat with no flare-up, which today means a low burner or a bowl over barely simmering water. Rice-thickened cream scorches on the base the moment it is left unstirred.
- Lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest; the white pith underneath turns the cream bitter as it cooks. Some cooks pare the rind in strips instead and lift it out with the cinnamon before serving.
- StrainingThe recipe as it survives does not say so, but passing the finished cream through a fine sieve will catch the cinnamon, stray zest, and any rice that has caught.
- YieldA pint of cream will fill several small glasses or one shallow dish; the surviving text breaks off before any instruction for cooling or setting.
"Trifle" in Victorian usage covered a wider family than the sponge-and-custard assembly we now expect: light sweets of flavoured cream, sometimes poured over ratafias or sponge fingers, sometimes served plain in glasses. The connection of the "Swiss" label to Switzerland is conventional rather than documented. Thickening with ground rice spared eggs, and ground rice was a cheap and widely available staple sold alongside sago and arrowroot.