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Dessert

Peach Trifle

A layered dessert of stale cake, peaches, wine, sugar, meringue, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Peach Trifle

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Line a serving dish with slices of stale cake.

  2. Fill the dish with sliced peaches and pour wine over them.

  3. Dust thickly with sugar.

Make the meringue

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Add powdered sugar and beat until fine and dry.

Assemble and bake

  1. Heap the meringue over the peaches.

  2. Dust the meringue with more powdered sugar.

  3. Place the dish on a board.

  4. Brown quickly in the oven at 400°F (200°C).

Serve

  1. Let it cool before serving with cream.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Peach + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together218 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Wine + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Stale cake slices
Forms the base layer and soaks up the wine and peach juices.
Sliced peaches
Provide moisture and fruity sweetness under the meringue.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma, and softens the cake as it soaks in.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam, they form the light structure of the meringue.
Powdered sugar
Makes the meringue fine and dry, and helps it brown in the oven.
Cream
Adds richness and a cool, fatty contrast to the warm fruit.

The step that matters

Brown the meringue quickly. Egg white foam sets and browns fast in a hot oven. Baking too long cooks the peaches and cake underneath and dries or weeps the meringue.

Swap the peach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wine, sugar, egg, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, sugar, egg, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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