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Fruit Crown
Prepare compote of fruit, adding fresh cocoanut; let stand on ice twenty-four hours; drain off juice; freeze. Prepare blancmange, using red raspberry juice instead of milk; sweeten; turn in border mould. When serving unmould and place the compote of fruit in centre; then heap frozen ice on top; cherries with stems are used as a decoration.
Three separate elements assembled at the last minute: a macerated fruit compote, a sorbet made from its drained syrup, and a jellied ring of raspberry blancmange. Read it backwards and make the mould first, since it needs several hours to set.
- The hingeEverything depends on the mould releasing cleanly. Rinse the ring mould with cold water before filling, chill until fully firm, then dip the base in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto the serving plate. Assemble only once it is out, or the frozen centre will start weeping into the jelly.
- Compote hereIn this period a compote of fruit means fruit in a light sugar syrup, kept whole or in pieces rather than boiled down to a jam; some versions cook the fruit briefly in the syrup, others simply steep it, and the recipe does not say which. Cover the cut fruit with a light syrup and leave it covered in the refrigerator for the full twenty-four hours; the standing time is what draws out the juice you later freeze.
- Border mouldA ring mould, roughly 4-6 cups. A savarin tin or an angel-food pan of similar volume works. The hollow centre is the whole point of the design.
- Blancmange without milkOrdinary blancmange is thickened with cornstarch or Irish moss, either of which would work here, though the result is opaque rather than clear. If you want a translucent raspberry ring, use gelatin instead: figure about one envelope (2 1/4 tsp) of powdered gelatin per 2 cups of juice, softened in a little cold juice then dissolved in the rest warmed, and sweeten to taste before it sets.
- Fresh coconutThe recipe calls for fresh cocoanut, which was grated from the nut; dried sweetened flake is much sweeter and tougher. Frozen grated coconut, thawed, is the closest substitute; if you use sweetened flake instead, reduce the sugar in the syrup accordingly.
- Freezing the drained juiceThe drained syrup becomes a sorbet. Churn it in an ice cream maker, or freeze it in a shallow pan and rake it with a fork every half hour to make a granita. Straight freezing without agitation gives a solid brick that cannot be heaped.
- Sweetness of the sorbetFruit juice with too little sugar freezes rock hard, too much and it will not set. A syrup that tastes slightly oversweet cold will freeze to about the right texture.
- ServingA 5-cup ring serves six to eight. Assemble at the table or immediately before carrying it out; the sorbet begins to slump within a few minutes against the jelly.
- Cherry garnishStems are what make the decoration, so fresh cherries in season are best; jarred maraschinos, even the stemmed kind, are too soft and sweet to hold up.
Moulded fruit jellies with a frozen centre were a set piece of turn-of-the-century American entertaining, by which time commercial ice delivery and domestic iceboxes had long made cold desserts practical in ordinary households as well as hotel kitchens. The name blancmange means 'white food' in French and originally described an almond-milk pudding; by the late nineteenth century it had loosened to mean almost any moulded starch or gelatin pudding, which is why a recipe can cheerfully call a red raspberry jelly a blancmange without apology. The ring-and-centre construction, a plain mould filled with something showier at the last moment, was a familiar device of the period.