Trifle
Prepare a rich custard with one cupful each of rich milk and thin cream, four eggs and one-half of a cupful of sugar; strain and when cold, flavor with vanilla and a little sherry. To one cupful of thick cream add two tablespoonfuls of sherry, one of brandy and one of powdered sugar and whip to a solid froth. Dip four sponge cakes into sherry, place in the bottom of the dish and pour over them a little of the custard. Fill the dish with alternate layers of macaroons dipped in sherry and custard. Over the top heap the whipped cream and sprinkle with a few almonds blanched and finely chopped.
A stirred custard, whipped cream and biscuits soaked in sherry — no oven involved, but two of the three components depend on temperature control and the cream needs handling in the right order.
- The hinge: custard temperatureFour eggs to two cups of dairy is a pouring custard, not a set one. Cook it over gentle heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon and reads 175-180F; past 185F it curdles. The direction to strain suggests bits of cooked egg were expected.
- Thin cream and thick cream"Thin cream" is light or single cream, roughly 18-20 percent fat; half-and-half is the nearest supermarket equivalent. "Thick cream" means heavy or double cream, 36 percent or above, which is what you need for the topping to hold.
- Whip first, then flavourWhip and flavour -- Two tablespoons of sherry and one of brandy is enough added liquid to make a single cup of cream harder to whip. The recipe adds it first; you may find it easier to whip to soft peaks, then trickle in the spirits and sugar and finish to a "solid froth" — stiff but not grainy.
- Sponge cakesProbably small individual sponges rather than slices of a layer cake, closer to ladyfingers or savoiardi. Use as many as it takes to line the bottom of your dish.
- MacaroonsIn this period a macaroon is usually a crisp almond-and-egg-white biscuit, not a French macaron; coconut versions existed too, but the almond kind is the likelier intent here. Amaretti are the closest thing on the shelf and their bitter-almond note suits the sherry.
- Which sherryA sweeter sherry — an amontillado, or a cream sherry (which is sweetened oloroso; oloroso itself is dry) — stands up better against the custard than a dry fino.
- Assembly and restingDip the biscuits rather than soaking them; they collapse quickly. Build the layers and chill for several hours so everything firms and the flavours settle, though a custard this loose stays soft rather than setting. The recipe adds the cream and almonds at assembly; adding them nearer serving keeps the top firm.
- YieldTwo cups of custard and a cup of cream make a modest trifle: figure a dish of a quart to a quart and a half, serving perhaps six. A clear-sided dish shows the layers.
Trifle is one of the oldest surviving English dessert names, recorded in the sixteenth century for something much simpler: sweetened cream flavoured and thickened. The word derives from an Old French root (trufle) carrying the sense of trickery or a thing of no consequence. The layered version developed as cooks began soaking biscuits or stale cake in sack — the fortified Spanish wine that became modern sherry — and building custard over them; the closely related wine-soaked dessert is called tipsy cake. The arrangement here — sponge below, macaroons through the middle, boiled custard, whipped cream, chopped almonds on top — is one of several current in American cook books of the period.