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Iced Pudding
Make a custard with half a pint of milk, the yolks of four eggs, two ounces of sugar, and a little vanilla. When thick and smooth add half a pint of cream and half a gill of maraschino. Freeze till stiff. Take two ounces of stale spongecake soaked in cream and two ounces of dried fruit, consisting of dried cherries and pineapple, cut small. Put the mould in ice. Place a little of the ice cream at the bottom, then a layer of fruit and another of spongecake. Repeat till the mould is full. Cover closely and embed in ice.
A moulded bombe in Victorian dress: a cooked custard ice layered with cake and fruit, then set hard in an ice-and-salt bath. The custard stage is where it succeeds or fails.
- Half a gill of maraschinoA gill is a quarter-pint, so half a gill is roughly 2 to 2½ fl oz depending on whether the measure is US or imperial — a generous pour into roughly a pint of base. Alcohol depresses the freezing point, so the mixture will set softer and slower than a plain custard ice; do not increase it.
- Cook the custard to 175-180FFour yolks to half a pint of milk is a rich ratio that thickens fast. Stir over a bain-marie or very low heat until it coats the spoon, then strain at once into the cold cream to arrest it. Boiled yolks curdle and no amount of freezing hides the grain.
- "Freeze till stiff" without a machineThe original assumes a pail freezer packed with crushed ice and coarse salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt, worked with a paddle. A modern ice cream machine does the same job; failing that, freeze in a shallow tray and beat thoroughly three or four times as it sets, or the texture goes coarse.
- Dried cherries and pineappleIn Victorian usage these are most likely candied or glacé fruits rather than the chewy dried fruit sold now. Glacé cherries and candied pineapple give the intended sweetness and stay soft when frozen; genuinely dried fruit turns hard in ice cream unless macerated first.
- Stale sponge cakeStale is deliberate — day-old crumb absorbs the cream without collapsing into paste. Two ounces is about one thick slice, broken into pieces rather than crumbled.
- Packing the mouldChill the mould first, fill it in layers with no air pockets, press a disc of parchment on the surface, then cover and bury it in ice and salt for two to three hours. A modern freezer at 0F does the job in three to four hours, or overnight.
- Turning it outDip the mould in warm water for a few seconds, wipe it, and invert onto a cold dish. The alcohol keeps the pudding softer than a plain ice, so serve straight away.
- YieldAbout a pint and a half of finished pudding — four to six small servings, which is how a dish this rich was meant to be eaten.
"Iced pudding" is the English name for what French kitchens called a pudding glacé or bombe: an ice cream frozen in a shaped mould, usually layered with cake, fruit or a second flavour of ice. It belongs to the moment when domestic ice became cheap. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled, block ice cut from lakes and imported in insulated ships, along with early mechanical ice-making, had put the ice pail within reach of an ordinary well-run household rather than only the great house with its own ice pit. The maraschino is a marker of that same commercial reach — a clear cherry liqueur generally traced to Zara in Dalmatia, made from marasca cherries and their crushed stones, and a standard flavouring in Victorian confectionery long before it lent its name to the bottled cocktail cherry. Layering the mould in ice and salt, rather than churning and serving loose, gave the cook a dish that could be built hours ahead and brought to table looking architectural, which was the whole point of a dinner sweet in this period.