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Frozen Fig Pudding
1 quart milk, 11/2 tablespoonfuls gelatine, 4 eggs, 1 cupful sugar, 1/4 pound English walnuts, 1/4 pound figs, vanilla to taste. Soak gelatine in cold milk. Put milk, eggs, and sugar in double boiler and cook to custard. Chop nuts and figs very fine and add with gelatine to custard. Cool, add flavoring, turn into ice-cream freezer and freeze. Can be improved by substituting cream for milk.
A gelatine-stabilised frozen custard rather than a steamed pudding — the name follows the older usage in which any rich moulded dessert was a "pudding." Nearly all the work is in the custard, and it will forgive you nothing if it overheats.
- Split the milkThe gelatine is soaked in cold milk taken from the quart, not in an additional quantity. Measure out about half a cup, sprinkle the gelatine over it, and let it stand five minutes before the rest goes to the double boiler.
- Gelatine measure1 1/2 tablespoonfuls of granulated gelatine is roughly 11-14 g, or close to two of the standard 1/4-oz envelopes. Strengths of old granulated gelatines are not reliably comparable to modern ones, so err toward the lower end or the finished ice turns slightly chewy.
- Custard temperatureCook to 170-175F (77-80C), stirring constantly, until it coats the back of a spoon. Above about 180F the eggs curdle, and a double boiler slows that failure without preventing it.
- Strain and chillPass the custard through a sieve before adding the nuts and figs, then chill it thoroughly — several hours or overnight. A warm custard poured into a freezer gives coarse, grainy ice.
- Figs and walnuts1/4 pound of dried figs is about 3/4 cup once stemmed and chopped; English walnuts are ordinary walnuts, and 1/4 pound is about a cup of halves. Chop both finer than seems necessary, since large pieces freeze into hard nuggets.
- FreezingIn a modern machine, churn 20-30 minutes to the texture of soft-serve, then harden in the freezer at least four hours. The old hand freezer used a 3:1 mix of cracked ice to rock salt in the outer bucket.
- The cream substitutionTaking the author's suggestion, replace one or two cups of the milk with heavy cream. Fat is what keeps this from freezing hard; all-milk custard relies entirely on the gelatine and sugar and sets noticeably icier.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten.
Frozen puddings occupy an odd corner of turn-of-the-century American dessert cookery: rich custards weighted with dried fruit and nuts, frozen in the same crank freezer used for plain vanilla, and served as though they were the boiled and steamed puddings they were named after. Gelatine suggests a comparatively late recipe — commercially packaged granulated gelatine became a common pantry article around the 1890s. The figs were most likely imported dried Smyrna figs from Asia Minor, then the usual grocery article; California's Smyrna fig plantings were only beginning to compete. Walnuts were called "English" to distinguish them from the native black walnut, a much stronger-flavoured nut.