A Trifle

History

A trifle is built in layers: a dish is filled with finely broken biscuit, rusk and spiced cake, wet with wine, then covered with a boiled custard — deliberately not too thick — and topped with a syllabub, the whole garnished with jelly and flowers. It is the assembly, not any single element, that makes the dish: soaked cake, custard and frothed cream stacked in one glass or bowl.

The name is far older than this layered form. Its earliest recorded use was for something quite different — a thick cream flavoured with sugar, ginger and rosewater in Thomas Dawson's The Good Huswifes Jewell of 1585. Early trifles of that kind were closer to fools, puréed fruit folded through sweetened cream, with no cake and no custard beneath. The trifle that stacks wine-soaked biscuit under boiled custard and syllabub did not appear until the 1750s; one of the first such recipes was printed in the 1751 edition of Hannah Glasse's Art of Cookery. Glasse's instruction — to wet the biscuits, make "a good boiled custard, not too thick," pour it over when cold, and "put a syllabub over that" — runs almost word for word into this later version, which likewise pours "a good boil'd custard, (not too thick) over the rusk, and put a syllabub over that."

What the record here does not keep is the trifle's passage across the Atlantic: how the English layered form reached this American book, whom it was set before, or what a New England household substituted when Naples biscuits and imported wine were scarce. The recipe names ingredients without quantities and trusts the cook to judge the custard and the froth, leaving the proportions — and the occasions it graced — unwritten.

Ingredients

• biscuit
• rusk
• spiced cake
• wine
• boiled custard
• syllabub
• jelly and flowers

Instructions

1. Fill a dish with finely broken biscuit, rusk and spiced cake.
2. Wet it with wine.
3. Pour a good boiled custard, not too thick, over the rusk.
4. Put a syllabub over that.
5. Garnish with jelly and flowers.