Where have all the trifles gone? Whatever happened to the UK's greatest pudding?

 I was lying in bed last night, trying to sleep, when I got thinking about puddings. As a child, eating my pudding was the highlight of my life, before I discovered girls, beer and rock and roll. At school, we were virtually forced to eat school dinners, invariably horrible slop that was accompanied by the smell of boiled cabbage. The biggest sanction was that if you didn't eat your dinner, there was no pudding for you. There were good puddings and bad. The best was probably arctic roll or apple pie and custard. The worst? Tapioca or semolina. There were various other dishes, chocolate cake with chocolate custard, raspberry cake with pink custard. Depending on which turned up, defined your day. One of the more disappointing was the school trifle. This infuriated me as at home Trifle was the best pudding of all. The school version had tasteless jelly, thin custard and pretend cream. At home, it was sumptious, biscuits soaked in sherry, proper thick set custard, real cream, tinned fruit (preferably mandarin oranges), with a sprinkle of 100's and 1,000's.

Pic www.kittyfain.blog/tag/1970s-food/

I'd tend to judge how good people's parents were by the quaity of the trifle they served up. Now you may think this terribly middle class, but in fact some of the best makers of trifle were the less well to do parents amongst our group of friends. When you are a kid, your main criteria is how sweet the pudding is and if you can make it more interesting, that puts it there as a winner. One friends mum put chocolate digestives in, we thought she was a genius, perhaps not realising she just didn't have any trifle biscuits. As a default, you'd get the Birds Trifle knocked up. Unless a few jelly babies or smarties were sprinkled on top, we'd take a dim view. 

As I thought about it, I realised that I'd not seen trifle on the menu at a restaurant for ages. In fact, apple pie and custard is perhaps the only one of the old school puddings you ever see served these days. These days, cheesecake seems to be the pudding of choice at most places. I recall the first time I came across cheesecake. My mum bought a cheesecake mix and made one. It was sugary gunge. It seemed nice enough. I didn't realise it was the beggining of the end for proper, decent puddings. After the first one, mum rarely made puddings again. Even worse, party spreads no longer featured a wonderful big trifle. Whereas puddings had been bulky, sweet and filling, now they are tiny, delecate and 'clever'. They are excuses for cooks to show off, but to me this is not a pudding. In fact, to ensure that the point is missed, restaurants now call them desserts. 

I am sorely tempted to have a belated 60th Party and make it a 60's theme. A big trifle would deffo be the centrepiece. In truth, I no longer have a sweet tooth, but given the year I've had I think I deserve a decent trifle, don't you?