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Dessert

The Alpine Club Trifle

A layered trifle made with sponge cakes, custard, milk, sugar, and flavored with Madeira wine and Goodall's White Blanc-mange Powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and spinach share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

The Alpine Club Trifle

Ingredients

Directions

Build the base

  1. Cut one sponge cake into four lengthwise pieces, making them uneven in height.

  2. Hollow out the inside edge of each quarter to fit closely around the center cake.

  3. Soak the center cake well with Madeira wine in a glass dish.

  4. Crumble the cuttings and place the four quarters around the center piece.

  5. Strew sweet biscuit crumbs over the bottom of the dish.

Add custard and topping

  1. Pour custard over the crumbs, ensuring it is slightly thicker than cup custard.

  2. Prepare Goodall's White Blanc-mange Powder with 1 pint of milk and sweeten with sugar.

  3. Pour the warm mixture over the sponge cakes to create a snowy appearance.

Make the popcorn

  1. Pop some Indian corn in a covered pot over heat until it pops.

  2. Grind the popped corn when cool.

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. Biscuit + spinachtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Sugar + biscuittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Milk + biscuittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Madeira wine + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together343 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sponge cakes
Provide the structure that holds the soaked layers and custard together.
Madeira wine
Soaks into the centre cake, adding moisture and a rich, fortified flavour.
Goodall's white blanc-mange powder
Thickens the milk so the topping sets into a smooth, white layer.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the blancmange powder thickens.
Custard
Adds moisture and richness over the crumbs and sponge.
Sugar
Sweetens the blancmange topping.

The step that matters

Thickness of the custard layer. A custard thicker than a cup custard holds its shape on the crumbs instead of seeping down and turning the base soggy.

Swap the spinach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (madeira wine, milk, sugar, biscuit):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against madeira wine, milk, sugar, biscuit. 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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