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Iced Strawberry Pudding
1 pound of sugar 1 pint of water 1 pint of strawberry juice.
Yolks of six eggs.
Boil the sugar and water together for thirty minutes, watching carefully that it does not get too thick. Beat the yolks of the eggs very light, add them to the boiling syrup, stir over the fire a moment, then turn into a large bowl. Beat continuously until cold and thick like a sponge cake batter, then add the strawberry juice and freeze.
This is a pâte à bombe — a cooked egg-yolk foam — thinned with fruit juice and churned. There is no cream in it, so the finished texture sits between an ice cream and a sorbet.
- The measuresA pint is 2 cups; a pound of sugar is about 2¼ cups granulated. The syrup is therefore roughly equal parts sugar and water by volume before boiling.
- How far to boil the syrupThirty minutes at a steady boil takes a syrup well past thread stage. Aim for about 238-240F on a thermometer (soft-ball) and stop there; the warning that it must not "get too thick" is the whole point of the instruction, since a syrup taken to caramel will seize the yolks.
- Adding the syrup to the yolksPour the hot syrup into the beating yolks in a thin stream rather than tipping the yolks into the pan, which is what "add them to the boiling syrup" invites. Syrup at this temperature should carry the yolks well up toward 160F, but nothing in the method verifies it, so treat the base as only partly cooked unless you check it with a thermometer.
- Beat until coldThe instruction to beat continuously until cold and thick as sponge batter is not optional and takes 8-12 minutes in a stand mixer. This is where the volume comes from; a warm base will churn into a dense, syrupy block.
- The strawberry juiceA pint of juice means roughly 2 to 3 lb of ripe berries, crushed and pressed through a sieve or jelly bag. Do not purée and use it unstrained — pulp and seeds make the frozen pudding gritty, and 'juice' here most likely means strained juice.
- FreezingChurn in an ice cream maker until it holds soft peaks, then firm it in the freezer for 3-4 hours. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and beat it smooth two or three times as it sets; the egg foam gives it enough body to survive still-freezing better than a plain water ice.
- Sweetness and yieldA full pound of sugar is very sweet by current taste and was partly there to keep the mixture soft in a salt-and-ice freezer. Reducing it to about 12 oz gives a cleaner strawberry flavour but a harder set. Expect roughly 1½ quarts, serving eight.
"Iced pudding" was the nineteenth-century English term for what French kitchens called a bombe or pouding glacé: a moulded frozen sweet, variously built on a cooked yolk-and-syrup foam or on a boiled custard. Books of this kind proliferated in the late 1800s once commercially harvested lake ice was cheap enough for ordinary households to keep an icebox and a hand-cranked freezer, which put frozen desserts within reach of cooks who a generation earlier would have needed an ice house on the property. The absence of cream is worth noticing.