The Spirit of Trifle
Trifle-haters LOOK AWAY NOW
‘And watched the world turn day-glo
You know, you know
The world turned day-glo, you know
Uh-oh’
I love all forms of trifle, from the restrained and tasteful to the trollopy, day-glo or kitsch. Yet no matter how architecturally careful your construction, a trifle’s essential nature is one of generosity and largesse as it escapes the confines of its bowl and billows across the plate. It is a slumped and rumpled mass just dying to be free. And does any food look more relaxed than a leftover trifle the morning after the night before? Nope. Debauched dissolution is the point; a trifle is not a hamburger, tomato sandwich or chip butty, all of which need to retain structural integrity down to the very last bite. Helen Saberi and Alan Davidson defend creativity in the introduction to their monograph about trifles:
‘It is difficult to think of any trifle recipe whose instructions should be treated as sacrosanct. Almost all contain ingredients which can be substituted for something else without detriment….Variations on the trifle’, they add, ‘seem to us to be just as infinite as the stars in the sky.’
So, make your trifle how you like and respect its abundant spirit. Don’t listen to anyone who says there’s One Ur Way, and certainly don’t sleep with them unless you like being bored to death- it’d be like dancing the can-can in a grey shroud. Basically, if someone seeks to inhibit your trifle creativity, take it as a red flag. They’ll be the kind of person who makes the bed while you are still in it.
I have to confess that I wasn’t born liking trifle, and I was nearly fifty before I began to enjoy it properly, the major stumbling block being the layer of cold custard you see in many of its permutations (which I didn’t realise was negotiable rather than essential), but child-me adored the trifle-pillaging scene in My Naughty Little Sister.
My Naughty Little Sister was written by Dorothy Violet Ellen Edwards in 1950 and published in 1952. Its food scenes should be read in the context of the Second World War and the lingering psychological effects of food rationing, a policy that didn’t end until 1954, nine years after the armistice. They are fantasies driven by a longing for food in all its unrationed pre-war state, with achievable, affordable meals made and eaten by working and lower-middle-class families at their core. Look at the food mentioned: jellies and blancmanges, cakes with cherries on, biscuits and an enormous birthday cake with candles and icing all take pride of place; sandwiches barely a small look in. This largesse of cream, butter, sugar, eggs, and day-glo candied frippery must have been sorely missed during the war years. It is celebration food along the lines of ‘Happy Birthday, War is Over’ (with apologies to John and Yoko).
That Edward’s Naughty Little Sister characters are almost certainly from the working or lower-middle-class feels obvious to me. From the clothes, hairstyles, toys, furnishings and everyday tasks (laundry day, shopping, cleaning, gardening) to all manner of events (the fair, parties, school), we are offered a vision of post-war England that reflects not only the childhood background of its author who was born working class but that the books’ intended audiences. Illustrator Shirley Hughes (whose own background was more privileged than that of Edwards) had this to say in an interview with The Guardian* about the changing nature of her commissioned work:
"I was on the cusp of a change. From the 1920s right up to the end of the Second World War, most children's books were for and about middle-class children because they were the only people who could afford them."
"But after the war, the children's library service got going, and that opened up a whole world of books to children whose parents couldn't afford to buy them. And a whole generation of writers and illustrators, including me, had a much wider public to write for."
I was born in 1966, just 21 years after the war's end and 12 years after the end of rationing, to a family marked by the depredations it caused. We recycled everything and wasted nothing. Time has rendered this a bit grim. The Day the World Turned Day‐Glo by X-Ray Spex didn’t come out until 1978, but this song plays in my head whenever I make a trifle. Its lyrics make me think of how its super-charged appearance at the table punctured a hole in a fairly mundane rotation of meals during the latter part of the seventies. Today, people wax nostalgic over this period’s comparative lack of manufactured colourful drama and its wealth of homespun ingredients and meals. I don’t. "Most people thought the song was about tripping, but I was using images of artificiality,” Poly Styrene, its writer and the lead singer of X-Ray Spex, told Mojo Magazine. “I grew up in a generation where all we had was brown paper bags in the local store, but gradually, everything became more colourful. Day-Glo symbolized the shift from natural to synthetic. We weren't buying cotton any more but Bri-Nylon. It was a great time; people were discovering things with technology."
Hundreds and Thousands were the trifle decoration of choice for my grandparents, along with angelica, which was cut into tiny diamond shapes. My grandfather told me that during the Second World War, children used to use their sweet ration coupons to buy hundreds and thousands because they were cheaper and went further. It’s easy to buy tubs of ready-cut, brightly-coloured angelica now, but I remember it coming in green pieces which you had to cut up yourself. That was one of my jobs. We sometimes had tubs of little silver and gold balls, which I’d hurl across the trifle’s top layer of cream like a drunken bowls player railing against suburbia. I hated them; I still do, and I’d get in trouble because the balls would sink into the cream- my grandfather called this phenomenon ‘piss holes in the snow’. (He also used this term to describe heavy eyeliner; New Man, he was not.) I wasn’t all that fussed about structure and the laws of physics as applied to the construction of trifle. I’m still not. It matters far less than you think unless you make a deconstructed trifle.
Nonetheless, Trifle’s introduction includes an essay titled ‘Trifle Architecture,’ where Davidson and Saberi advise cooks to consider how they might maintain the pudding’s structural integrity from the foundations upwards. I am prepared to tolerate this instruction because it is wry and gentle. They talk of ‘moist, compacted sponge and macaroons or whatever bound by jam to prevent disconcerting shifts…’
‘Special attention must be paid to the loadbearing capacity of the topping…There are many variables here, of which the trifle decorator should be mindful,’ they write before warning us of the capacity tiny hundreds and thousands have for ‘penetrating the topping at fairly high speed’. My freewheeling attitude towards trifle rails slightly against such instruction whilst recognising it as good sense. Not everyone is as tolerant of a trifle that resembles an Austrian blind in a too-small window as I am. So, remember the wise words of May Byron, author of The Pudding Book (1923) and a prolific writer who had what I consider to be the last words on the subject: ‘Trifle is as difficult to define, though by no means so to devour….It requires elaboration, imagination and ingenuity to be a complete success, also some recklessness as regards economy.’
Some of my favourite trifley links:
Zuza Zak’s Latvian Rye Bread Trifle with Summer Berries and Honey and Rye Trifle are stunning. Find her website here.
Look at this Battenburg Trifle with Meringue Crown from Waitrose with its peach, wine jelly, and tiny ready-made meringues. Ignore the fact that it’s garnished with edible gold leaf, which, as Chef Jackson Boxer in a recent Insta Live was right to say, has no edible pleasures and, therefore, no place in food. If you want golden garnishes on your trifle, I recommend honeycomb.
A Pear, Apricot & Rosewater Pudding (Charlotta) by Yasmin Khan in FT (£). Here’s her substack:
A perfect example of ‘make your trifle how you want’, this Old-Fashioned Danish Apple Trifle is cosily rustic.
Sweet and sour Campari Blood Orange Trifle recipe.
I doubt he ever ate this, but the Elvis Trifle has bacon on it.
Mango and Coconut Trifles by Melissa Thompson.
A Yorkshire Parkin and Blackberry trifle from Good Food.
Nigel Slater’s Rhubarb and Ginger trifle.
Delia’s traditional Sherry Trifle.
I love watching trifle-making videos. This one is for a Mango Custard Trifle to celebrate Eid.
Southern Banana Pudding is a trifle as far as I am concerned. ‘Layers of silken custard, sliced bananas, and some manner of vanilla baked good come together to form a dessert greater than the sum of its parts,’ says this Food & Wine piece.
Phaidon’s The German Cookbook has a recipe for Pumpernickel and Apple Trifle that I want to try.
A calming recipe for a Tudor Trifle for when all the beheading gets a bit much.
A Turkish Delight Trifle to eat after you’ve watched Barbie for the sixth time. And a trifle made with malabi.
A recipe for Brigadeiro de Colher com Doce de Leite and an Ube-Keso Trifle.
Digital Spy’s trifle thread makes me laugh:
‘First, you take some sponge, which is boring to begin with, and then you waste some perfectly good sherry so that you have soggy sponge, which is vastly worse. Then you waste some perfectly good jam, add vile custard (which seals the fate of this monstrosity) and top with some pointless cream. The whole thing is appalling. I'm not saying that everyone who eats trifle should be brutally kicked to death, but, well, yes.’
WHAT IS IT ABOUT SCOTLAND AND TRIFLES
A link to a story about a tattoo inspired by the YouTube VT above (Warning: Scottish Sun link).
‘I don't think I could write a book that didn't include a recipe for trifle somewhere,’ writes Nigella in the headnotes to her Anglo-Italian trifle recipe. A woman with a richly-trifled oeuvre, she describes this as ‘the trifle to end all trifles’. It is a thing of beauty, but I believe the last trifle you eat will always be the one to end all trifles because of that ‘well-known’ psychological phenomenon called the Trifle Recency Effect that I didn’t just invent. Here are a few more of her recipes.
NO, I AM NOT MENTIONING *THAT* THANKSGIVING TRIFLE BECAUSE I HATE THAT SHOW.
NOTE: *I disagree with the interviewer’s description of Edwards as a ‘grand old writer’ in the tradition of Noel Streatfeild. She may have risen to great heights but was not born into a class known for its ease of access to a career in writing and publishing.
I had forgotten about My Naughty Little Sister, books I loved as a child and read them to my own! And trifle which was always my grandmother’s dessert of choice. She used to make me a special one that didn’t have cream, which I disliked as a child. And no one ever worried about we children eating the heavily sherries cake layer. Perhaps that’s why we liked it so much!
Oh and thanks for the x ray specs reminder