As "Friends" fans celebrate the show's 25th anniversary, many may still get a bad taste in their mouth when they think about Rachel Green's Thanksgiving trifle.
During the episode "The One Where Ross Got High" during season six, Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) tried her hand at a Thanksgiving dessert. Only Rachel was a terrible cook — and a confused one. After the pages of two recipes unnoticeably stuck together, Rachel accidentally made one part English trifle (a traditional layered dessert) and one part shepherd's pie (a British entrée with ground beef or lamb, peas, onions, carrots and mashed potatoes).
“It’s a trifle. It’s got all of these layers. First, there’s a layer of ladyfingers, then a layer of jam, then custard, which I made from scratch. Raspberries, more ladyfingers," Rachel said in the episode. "Then beef sautéed with peas and onions. Then more custard and then bananas and then I just put some whipped cream on top.”
For the record, the meat and peas do not belong.
So how did this nauseating combination of ingredients come to be? According to "Friends" episode writer Greg Malins, it sprung from a debate in the writer's about a trifle versus tripe, an edible part of a cow's stomach.
"We were like, ‘Doesn’t a trifle have meat in it?’ We’re like, ‘No, it’s got pudding in it.’ You have to understand back then there’s no internet, and there weren’t a lot of cooking shows on TV,” Malins told Entertainment Weekly.
Merging the two recipes into one hilarious script, at first, didn't seem like it would work. But after a little leap of faith and some incredible acting (as always), the meat trifle was born.
