Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Trifle

A chilled custard trifle made with lemon juice, milk, cornflour, sugar, and Swiss roll slices, garnished with glace cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Trifle

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil 1 pint of milk with 2 teaspoons of cornflour and 2 oz of sugar for 1–2 minutes.

  2. Set the custard aside to cool overnight.

  3. Add the strained juice of 2 lemons to the custard and beat for 6 minutes until smooth.

Assemble and chill

  1. Pour the lemon custard over Swiss roll slices laid closely in a glass dish, ensuring they are completely covered.

  2. Refrigerate for 2–3 hours before serving.

  3. Garnish with glace cherries before serving.

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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Milk
Forms the base of the custard and provides its creamy body.
Cornflour
Thickens the milk into a smooth custard as its starch swells when heated.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright flavour that cuts through the sweet custard.
Swiss roll slices
Form the sponge layer that soaks up custard in the trifle.

The step that matters

Adding the lemon juice to the custard. Acid can thin or curdle a thickened custard if it is added while the custard is hot or unset. Adding the strained juice to the cooled custard and beating it smooth helps keep the texture silky.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes