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Frozen Pudding II
1 quart cream 3/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup rum 1 cup candied fruit 8 lady fingers Cut fruit in pieces, and soak several hours in brandy to cover. Mix cream, sugar, and rum, then freeze. Line a two-quart melon mould with lady fingers, crust side down; fill with alternate layers of the cream and fruit, cover, pack in salt and ice, and let stand two hours. Brandied peaches cut in pieces, with some of their syrup added, greatly improve the pudding.
This is a bombe glacée in all but name: a rum-flavoured frozen cream packed into a lined mould and set in a salt-and-ice bath rather than a freezer. Everything about it works in a modern kitchen, but the freezing method needs translating.
- Freeze the cream first, in a machine"Then freeze" means churn, in the period sense of a hand-cranked bucket freezer. Use an ice cream maker and churn the sweetened cream to a soft-serve consistency before it goes anywhere near the mould. Cream simply left to set solid in a container will freeze to an icy block.
- The rum will fight youA quarter cup of spirit in a quart of cream measurably lowers the freezing point, so the mixture churns slowly and stays soft. That softness is intentional here, but it also means the packed mould genuinely needs its full standing time to firm up.
- Brandy for the fruit is unlistedThe ingredient list names only rum, yet the method has you soak the candied fruit in brandy to cover. Allow an extra half cup or so of brandy. The recipe does not say whether to drain the fruit; its closing suggestion of brandied peaches "with some of their syrup added" implies a little of the liquid going in is no bad thing.
- Salt and ice, or the freezerPacking in salt and ice means burying the sealed mould in roughly one part coarse salt to three parts crushed ice, which holds it well below 32F. A modern freezer will do the job without the drips, though air chills far less efficiently than a salt-and-ice bath in contact with the metal, so allow longer than the two hours given.
- The mouldA two-quart melon mould is a lidded, ribbed metal form. Any two-quart bowl or loaf tin lined with plastic wrap works; the wrap is what lets you turn the pudding out cleanly, since these old moulds relied on a brief dip in warm water.
- Lady fingersSavoiardi, the dry Italian kind, are the right thing — they hold their shape against the cream. Soft sponge-style lady fingers collapse into paste. "Crust side down" means the rounded, sugared face against the mould, so it shows when unmoulded.
- ServingTwo quarts serves ten to twelve in slices. Move it from freezer to refrigerator for fifteen minutes before turning out, or the alcohol-free lady finger casing will be harder than the cream inside.