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Dessert

A Trifle

A layered dessert of biscuits, cakes, custard, and cream, garnished with jelly and comfits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

A Trifle

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble the base

  1. Break Naples biscuits, macaroons, and ratifia cakes into pieces and layer them in a trifle dish.

  2. Wet the biscuits and cakes with white wine.

Make the custard and top

  1. Make a boiled custard with the cream, sugar, and egg yolks, and pour it over the layered biscuits.

  2. Froth the remaining cream and spread it on top of the custard.

  3. Garnish with ratifia cakes, currant jelly, and colored comfits.

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Biscuit + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together312 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. White wine + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness as they set when gently heated.
Cream
Adds fat and richness to the custard and forms the whipped topping.
Naples biscuits
Soak up the wine and form the soft, layered structure of the trifle.
White wine
Moistens the biscuits and cakes, adding acidity and aroma.

The step that matters

Make a boiled custard with the cream, sugar, and egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble if they get too hot or are heated too fast. Cook gently and stir constantly until the custard coats a spoon.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, white wine, cream, sugar, lemon, egg, cinnamon. 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.

More trifle recipes

Apple 48Gooseberry 43Lemon 18Swiss Cream 17Brandy 13Grape 12 See all 115 →

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