Food - Bee Wilson on how teetotallers get drunk on Boxing Day
Trifle may be a thing of little importance, but it would be a mistake to overlook it. A glass bowl squelching with fruit, sponge, custard, jam and cream is among the most innocent pleasures of the British table. A good sherry trifle on Boxing Day is often the once-a-year opportunity for teetotallers to get drunk.
Victorian spoilsports avoided this danger by dividing trifles into "church trifle" (made with alcohol) and "chapel trifle" (made without). Similarly, the American food writer M F K Fisher categorises trifles as "innocent", or made with plain bottled fruit, and "not innocent" - doused with Kirschwasser or brandy.
But the really divisive question in a trifle is not alcohol but jelly. Over this question, the layers of a trifle come to represent the stratification of social classes. Andrew Martin could do an excellent "Class Conscious" column on the subject. As a rule of thumb, the posher the trifle, the less jelly. The snobbiest have none at all. When Helen Saberi, the co-author with Alan Davidson of Trifle (Prospect Books, £11.99), gave a recipe for trifle with jelly in a learned food journal, she was bombarded with "strongly worded protests". "This trifle appears more suited to a school treat than a gastronome's table," wrote one. The horror, the horror!
The anti-jelly brigade appear to have history on their side. The first published recipes for "trifle", starting in 1596, were nothing more than thickened, sweetened cream perfumed with rosewater and mace, or ginger, or cinnamon, or orange flower water. Thus the cream or syllabub element in trifle takes precedence over jelly. Hannah Glasse was probably the first to publish recipes for what we would recognise as trifle in 1751, when she gave instructions for layering a kind of zesty lemon cream with brioche-like bread and jam, but no jelly. Trifles on posh tables nowadays still conform to this, though often with added rum or Marsala, as in zuppa inglese. "The Dean's Cream", perhaps the most establishment of trifles, a pudding served at high table in Cambridge colleges, is a heady mixture of sponge, jam, ratafia, sherry, brandy, cream and decorative glace fruits, but emphatically not jelly.
At the opposite end of the social and jelly spectrum is Bird's packet trifle. Every Christmas, branches of the Co-op are festooned with special-offer Bird's trifle, alongside seasonal packets of rum sauce. To the uninitiated, it is puzzling how Bird's manages to fit an entire trifle into such a small cardboard container, never mind why it costs so little (at the time of writing, £1.50 for two packets, enough to serve 12). The answer is that the "trifle" consists of five enigmatic sachets, which you make up with water and milk: one of jelly crystals, one of boudoir biscuits, one of custard mix, one of trifle topping (which alarmingly transmutes into something the consistency of creme Chantilly when you whip it with cold milk) and one of chocolate sprinkles. Once you've engineered the various parts, it looks oddly convincing (the boudoir biscuits gleam like fruit inside the jelly) but tastes, as it only could, like a fake, gloopier version of jelly and ice cream.
In my own middle-class upbringing, trifles were somewhere between the two extremes, and usually came from Marks & Spencer in a fancy plastic mould. The rather floppy jelly was studded with "fruit cocktail" and made more bourgeois by adding real fresh cream and flaked almonds on top. The best bit was the disc of sponge in the middle, as soggy as a Liberal Democrat. The neither-one-thing-nor-the-other role of jelly in these trifles seems to confirm the correlation between jelly and class.
Under scrutiny, however, the correlation collapses. The Larousse gastronomique claims that "jelly is a modern addition" to trifle, but historically the very grandest trifles of all have contained jelly. In 1760, nine years after her first trifle recipe, Hannah Glasse wrote another, for "a grand trifle" containing "some very fine calves-foot jelly" as well as "Naples biscuits", macaroons, cakes and sweetened cream. Glasse notes that "this is fit to go to the King's table". You can't get much posher than that; unless, that is, you are a goddess. Nigella Lawson, it turns out, is also happy to make trifle with jelly, though in her case the jellied component is flavoured royally with rhubarb, blood orange juice and good Muscatel. Perhaps, after all, the mark of true class is being confident enough not to mind the vulgarity of a good trifle. Maybe the same even goes for Christmas.
If, on the other hand, you are appalled by this season in general and the distasteful consumerism of elaborate festive puddings in particular, here is the trifle for you, with neither jelly nor sponge, nor biscuits, nor jam, nor custard, nor fruit, nor wasteful liquor and cream: a trifle for Scrooges, of whatever class. Invented by Peg Bracken in The I Hate to Cook Book (1960), it is called London Trifle.
Simply combine equal quantities of marmalade and yogurt. And eat sourly.
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