Trifle

History

As printed in The Virginia House-Wife, the recipe "To make a trifle" layers slices of Savoy cake or Naples biscuit in the bottom of a deep dish, wets them with white wine, fills the dish nearly to the top with rich boiled custard, then tops it with half a pint of cream seasoned with white wine and sugar and whipped to a froth, piled high and decorated with thin-cut preserves. The Virginia House-Wife, by Mary Randolph, was first published in 1824 and is considered the first regional American cookbook; it proved popular enough to be republished at least nineteen times before the Civil War. The commonly circulated Project Gutenberg text (ebook 12519), from which this recipe is quoted, is a later printing whose title page is dated 1860. The dish itself is far older than this Virginia printing and English in origin. The earliest recorded use of the name "trifle" is in Thomas Dawson's 1585 English cookery book The Good Huswifes Jewell, where it named a thick cream flavoured with sugar, ginger and rosewater. Food historians describe these early trifles as closer to fools, and the two names were originally used interchangeably. It was not until the 1750s that the trifle took the layered form familiar today — biscuits soaked in wine, layered with custard and covered with a whipped syllabub froth — a form recorded in the 1751 edition of Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. Randolph's 1824 recipe follows that established English pattern. Beyond this, the historical record I could source does not document who ate this particular trifle, what it signified socially, or a specific route by which it reached Randolph's kitchen.

Ingredients

• Savoy cake or Naples biscuit
• white wine
• rich boiled custard
• 0.5 pint cream
• white wine
• sugar
• preserves

Instructions

1. Put slices of Savoy cake or Naples biscuit at the bottom of a deep dish. Wet the cake with white wine. Fill the dish nearly to the top with rich boiled custard.
2. Season half a pint of cream with white wine and sugar. Whip the cream to a froth. As it rises, take it lightly off and lay it on the custard. Pile it up high and tastily.
3. Decorate the top with preserves of any kind, cut so thin that their weight will not bear down the froth.