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Frozen Desserts: Pudding
Nesselrode Pudding. 1 pint large chestnuts, 1 pint cream, 1 pint water, Yolks 6 eggs, 2 cupfuls sugar, pint grated pineapple, 1 pound mixed French candied fruit, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexi can Vanilla.
Boil the chestnuts until tender, remove the shells and brown skins, press the pulp through a colander.
Boil the sugar and water together five minutes. Beat the yolks of eggs until light, add to the boiling sirup, take from the fire, and beat until thick and cool. When cool, add the candied fruit chopped fine, the vanilla, pineapple, and chestnuts. When frozen, remove the dasher, and stir in the cream, whipped to a stiff froth.
Iced Rice Pudding. cupful rice, 1 pint milk, 1 quart cream, 2 cupfuls sugar, Yolks 6 eggs, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexi can Vanilla.
Boil rice in 1 pint cold water; drain, cover with the milk, and boil half an hour longer. While this is boiling, whip the cream. After you have whipped all you can, add the remainder and what has drained from the other to the rice and milk. Stand the whipped cream in a cold place. Press the rice through a sieve, and return to the double boiler. Beat the yolks and sugar together, pour over the rice, stir, return again to the fire, and cook two minutes, or until it begins to thicken. Add the vanilla, stir in the whipped cream, remove the dasher, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK smooth down the pudding, repack, Strain and freeze. When frozen, reand stand two hours. Compote of Oranges. 1 dozen sweet oranges, 2 cupfuls sugar, Juice lemon, 1 gill water.
Put the sugar and water to boil; cook five minutes, skim, and add the lemon juice. Peel the oranges, cut in halves crosswise and cut out the cores with a sharp knife; put a few pieces at a time in the hot sirup, and lay them out singly on a flat dish; pour over them the remaining sirup and stand on ice to cool. To dish the pudding, lift out the can and carefully wipe off the brine. Wipe the bottom with a towel dipped in boiling water, put a dish over the top of it, turn it upside down, and remove the can. Heap the oranges on top and arrange them around the base of the pudding, pour the sirup over them, and serve.
Purée of Apricots. 1 quart can apricots, 1 cupful sugar, Yolks 6 eggs, 1 pint cream.
Mash the apricots, beat the yolks of eggs and sugar together until light, then add them with the cream to the apricots; turn into a double boiler, and stir until the eggs begin to thicken. Strain, and whip to the consistency of sponge-cake batter.
When cool, turn into a mold and set in ice and salt three hours.
Plombière. pound Jordan almonds, Yolks 7 eggs, 1 quart cream, cupful sugar.
Blanch and pound the almonds to a paste. Scald the cream in a double boiler, add the almonds, egg yolks and sugar beaten to a cream, and stir over the fire until they begin to thick; beat for three minutes. move the dasher, make a small well in the center, fill with apricot jam, cover, and stand two hours.
A run of frozen desserts from the era of the hand-cranked pail freezer, when a "pudding" could mean an iced custard packed in a mould. The techniques translate to a modern churn or to still-freezing, but several of the quantities have lost their fractions and need judgment.
- Missing fractionsSeveral amounts have dropped their fractions and cannot be recovered with confidence: the pineapple in the Nesselrode, the rice in the iced rice pudding, the lemon juice in the compote, and the almonds and sugar in the plombiere. Comparable period recipes suggest small amounts (a half or quarter measure), but treat these as unspecified and taste as you go rather than guessing large.
- GillA gill is half a cup, four fluid ounces. The orange compote syrup is therefore 2 cups sugar to only 1/2 cup water, which is a heavy syrup by design.
- The dasher and the canThese are written for a pail freezer: a metal can turning inside a bucket of cracked ice and coarse salt, with a paddle (the dasher) inside. "Remove the dasher and repack" means lift the paddle out once the mixture is frozen stiff, fold in the whipped cream, smooth the surface, replace the lid and bury the can in fresh ice and salt to ripen. In a modern machine, churn to soft-serve stage, fold the cream in by hand, then press into a chilled loaf pan or mould and firm up in the freezer for two hours.
- Ice and salt proportionsRoughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume gives a brine cold enough to freeze a moulded pudding solid. The apricot puree is moulded and buried rather than churned, so the mould must be sealed tightly at the seam or the brine will get in.
- McIlhenny's Mexican VanillaA brand of the period, named by name in the text; whether that reflects an advertising arrangement is not something the page itself establishes. Any good vanilla extract does the same work; a teaspoon is a teaspoon.
- ChestnutsA pint of chestnuts in the shell is something under a pound. Boil 20 to 30 minutes, then peel while still hot, since the inner brown skin bonds to the nut as it cools. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are an honest shortcut; skip straight to sieving.
- Egg yolksThe Nesselrode base is a pate a bombe: hot syrup beaten into raw yolks. The syrup does most of the cooking, but the mixture never reaches a measured temperature, so use pasteurized yolks if serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg. The rice pudding and apricot puree are cooked over water, but only briefly and to no stated temperature, so the same caution applies to them.
- Candied fruit"Mixed French candied fruit" of this period typically meant glaceed cherries, apricots, angelica and citron rather than the dyed cake mix sold at Christmas. Buy single fruits from a good confectioner and chop them yourself; a pound is a great deal, and half that suits most palates.
- YieldThe Nesselrode is a large recipe, appreciably more than two quarts by the volume of its ingredients; the iced rice pudding, with a quart of cream plus milk, is larger still. The orange compote is intended as the garnish and sauce for a turned-out moulded pudding, not as a dish on its own.
Nesselrode pudding is generally traced to the kitchen of Count Karl von Nesselrode, the Russian chancellor who presided over foreign affairs for much of the first half of the nineteenth century; his chef is traditionally credited with the chestnut-and-candied-fruit iced cream that carried the name across Europe and into American hotel menus. By the time this book was printed it was often chosen as the grand finale for a formal dinner, which is why it sits here beside plombiere (an almond ice, named for the French spa town of Plombieres in the usual telling) and an iced rice pudding turned out under a heap of syruped oranges. All of them depend on the same domestic technology: cracked ice, coarse salt and a crank. Ice was a delivered commodity in most towns by 1900, and the appearance of moulded frozen puddings in a general household manual rather than a professional cookbook marks the point at which what had been a confectioner's showpiece became something a household with a good pail freezer could attempt.