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Frozen Desserts: Beat
Scald 1 pint cream. Beat together the egg yolks, and sugar, stir into hot cream, cook one minute, take from the fire, and add the remaining pint cream. When frozen, stir in the apricots, which should be pared and cut in small pieces. Peach pudding may be made in the same manner.
Queen Pudding.
Line a melon mold two inches deep with vanilla ice cream or strawberry water ice. Have ready a pint frozen peaches; fill these into the center, cover with ice cream, put on the lid, bind the edges with a strip of buttered cloth, pack and stand two hours. When ready to serve, wipe the outside of the mold with a warm towel, and turn the pudding out on a large dish. Dust with grated macaroons, and serve immediately. Chesterfield Cream. 1¾ cupfuls sugar, Rind 1 lemon, 1 pint preserved damsons, 1½ pints cream, Yolks 3 eggs, 2 inch stick cinnamon.
Scald the cream with the cinnamon and the rind of lemon chipped. Beat the sugar and yolks together, add to the hot cream, cook one minute, strain, and when cold, freeze. When b a, Extension Strainer: b, Small Wire Strainer. frozen, stir in an extra pint cream whipped. Stand two hours. Serve with preserved damsons around it.
Macedoine of Fruit. 2 cupfuls sugar, 1 quart water, 3 bananas, Juice 2 oranges, 1 lemon, 1 small pineapple, 12 large strawberries, 1 gill strawberry jelly, 2 tablespoonfuls gelatin.
Cover the gelatin with a little cold water, and soak half an hour. Boil the sugar and water together ten minutes, add the gelatin, orange, and lemon juice, bananas cut into small pieces, pineapple picked into small pieces, strawberries cut into halves, and jelly cut into blocks. Freeze, turning the crank very slowly.
A run of five iced dishes from the era of the hand-cranked freezer, all built on the same custard-and-cream logic. A few of the measurements have gone missing in the original printing, and a couple of the techniques assume equipment no longer standing in most kitchens.
- The first recipe is incompleteThe ingredient list giving the number of yolks and the quantity of sugar is not on this page; the text picks up at "Scald 1 pint cream. Beat together the egg yolks, and sugar." The total cream is a quart. Any figure for yolks and sugar would be a reconstruction, not what the book says.
- Cooking the custard"Cook one minute" means one minute of stirring over low heat after the yolks go into the scalded cream — long enough to thicken to a coating consistency, around 175F. Beyond that the yolks scramble. The Chesterfield Cream is strained because it is infused with a cinnamon stick and chipped lemon rind.
- A gillHalf a cup. The gill of strawberry jelly in the macedoine is cut into cubes and suspended in the syrup, not dissolved.
- Gelatin and fresh pineappleRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatin and will keep the macedoine from setting. Simmer the pineapple pieces for a couple of minutes first, or use canned, which has been heated already.
- DamsonsSmall, sharp blue-black plums, usually sold preserved in heavy syrup or as jam. Any tart preserved plum stands in; sweet dessert plums do not, since the point is acidity against the cinnamon custard.
- Packing a moldThe melon mold is buried in a bucket of crushed ice layered with rock salt — roughly three parts ice to one of salt — for the two hours specified. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same work, though the pudding will be harder and wants ten minutes at room temperature before unmolding rather than the warm towel.
- "Turning the crank very slowly"Slow churning gives a coarser, more granular ice than a fast-churned cream, and keeps the fruit pieces and jelly blocks intact; the book does not say which effect is intended. In a modern machine, churn briefly or freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every half hour.
- YieldEach of these makes roughly a quart and a half to two quarts, serving eight to ten.
These belong to the last decades of the hand-cranked freezer, when ice was cut from northern lakes in winter, packed in sawdust, and sold through the summer — which is what made elaborate molded ices practical in an ordinary household rather than only in a confectioner's shop. The macédoine takes its name from Macedonia, traditionally explained as a reference to the mixed peoples of Alexander's empire, and in French cookery it means any assortment of fruits or vegetables cut small and bound together. Queen Pudding and Chesterfield Cream follow the older confectioner's practice of naming a molded ice after a title or a person, a convention that survives in pêche Melba. The buttered cloth bound around the mold's seam is doing real work: it seals out the salt water that would otherwise seep in from the packing ice and ruin the whole pudding.