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Nesselrode Pudding
Peel two dozen Spanish chestnuts. Put them into boiling water for five minutes, then take off the second skin, and boil them until tender with 1/2 stick of vanilla, and half the thin rind of a fresh lemon in the water with them. Drain them well, and pound them in a mortar. Press them through a hair sieve, and mix with them 1/4 of a pound of powdered sugar, 1 glass of maraschino, and 1/2 pint of thick cream. Dissolve 3/4 of an ounce of best isinglass in a little water, stir it into 1/2 pint of hot cream, add the chestnuts, etc., and keep stirring the mixture gently until it is sufficiently stiff to hold the fruit without letting it fall to the bottom. Work in 2 ounces of pickled and dried currants, and 2 ounces of candied citron cut into thin strips. Put the mixture into an oiled mould, and set in a cool place to stiffen. Time, about three-quarters of an hour to boil the chestnuts.
This is the set, moulded version of Nesselrode rather than the churned ice cream, thickened with isinglass instead of frozen in a machine. The whole thing turns on the stirring stage: the cream must be cooled and thickening before the fruit goes in, or the currants and citron sink and you get a plain chestnut cream with a fruit layer at the bottom.
- ChestnutsTwo dozen large chestnuts in the shell is roughly 1 lb, giving about 10-12 oz of peeled nut. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work and skip the two-stage peeling, though they will not pick up the vanilla and lemon from the cooking water.
- IsinglassIsinglass is a gelatin obtained from fish swim bladders, and it is weaker and less consistent than modern sheet or powdered gelatin. Three-quarters of an ounce of it is not a straight swap; work from the setting strength printed on whatever gelatin you use for a pint of liquid plus solids, and err on the soft side.
- A glass of maraschinoIn a nineteenth-century English book a wine glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz. Maraschino here means the liqueur distilled from marasca cherries, stones included, not the syrup from a jar of bright red cherries.
- Powdered sugarThis means finely ground sugar, closest to modern caster or superfine. Confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will dull the texture slightly, though it will dissolve.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh sieve or a food mill on its finest plate. A food processor alone leaves the chestnuts grainy; the sieving is what makes the pudding smooth.
- VanillaHalf a stick is half a vanilla bean, split. Half a teaspoon of extract stirred in at the end is the practical substitute, since extract boiled in water loses most of its aroma.
- The setting stageStir the mixture over ice or in a cold bowl until it thickens to the consistency of lightly whipped cream before folding in the fruit. Adding it too early sinks it; too late and you cannot distribute it without breaking the set.
- Mould and chillingOil the mould with a neutral oil, wiped almost dry. "A cool place" means the refrigerator, 4-6 hours or overnight; unmould by dipping the mould briefly in warm water. Serves six to eight.
Nesselrode is named for Count Karl von Nesselrode, the Russian foreign minister whose tenure spanned the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I and ran into that of Alexander II, and the dish is traditionally credited to his chef -- the attribution is repeated everywhere and documented nowhere very firmly, though versions were in print by the 1830s. What made it distinctive was chestnut pur"e, an expensive base in an era when chestnuts had to be peeled by hand, enriched with cream, dried fruit and maraschino. Nineteenth-century cookbooks print it in two forms: a frozen version churned like an ice cream, and this moulded cream stiffened with isinglass, which a household without an ice cave could manage. By 1900 Nesselrode pudding was a standard restaurant dessert; it survived in the United States into the mid-twentieth century mainly as a rum-and-fruit ice cream flavour and a pie filling, long after the chestnuts had largely dropped out.