3 oz of brown bread crumbs or college biscuits. 2 oz caster sugar, juice of one lemon or orange. 1 wine glass of sherry, brandy or curaçao. ¼ oz gelatin, ½ pint whipped cream. Melt the gelatine in a little water. Put the crumbs into a basin with the juices and wine and sugar. Add the gelatine and lastly the whipped cream. Put into a mould and when set turn out, fill the centre with any kind of jam, gooseberry, or cranberry, or fruit syrup may be poured around. This pudding is much better made with college biscuits (pounded).
It’s not the most difficult-to-imagine dessert in the notebooks, but perhaps the second. College biscuits seem to have vanished into the mists of time, the only reference I could find to them being “…[t]here were also ‘College Biscuits’ which all but the very hungry never touched – they could only be broken if dipped in tea”. At a guess, I’m going for something like either a ship’s biscuit or a hopefully a Bath Oliver (now, disappointingly, made under license by Jacobs).
I have a recipe for cheesecake that’s not disimilar, except that there the biscuit base and the sugar/cream and separate while here it seems a mix. I wonder if that’s what was really meant? A
It would be nice to think so, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately there are a few other recipes – await with bated breath – of a similar ilk that are much more explicit in their instructions to mix everything together into a uniform mass. The homogenous trifle is a thing to behold…