Plumbiere
Make a rich custard, and flavor it when cool with wine and extract of lemon. When half frozen, add blanched almonds, chopped citron, brandy peaches cut up, and any other brandied or crystallized fruit. Make the freezer half full of custard and fill with fruit.
A late-nineteenth-century frozen custard in the French style, written for a cook who already knew how a hand-crank freezer behaved. The gaps are in proportion and technique rather than in method.
- What a "rich custard" meantThe recipe gives no proportions. A stirred egg custard on the order of 4 cups of milk or cream to 6-8 egg yolks and about 3/4 cup sugar, cooked until it coats a spoon (roughly 170-175F), is a reasonable reconstruction. Chill it thoroughly, ideally the day before; a warm custard will not churn well.
- Flavor when cool, and whyWine and lemon extract are added off the heat because both are volatile and the alcohol will drive off if stirred into a hot custard. Figure a few tablespoons of sweet wine, such as sherry or Madeira, and half a teaspoon of extract.
- The freezer"The freezer" is a bucket-style churn: an inner canister surrounded by cracked ice and rock salt, roughly 3 parts ice to 1 part salt by volume, cranked by hand. A modern countertop ice cream maker does the same job. Note that the recipe's "half full" describes filling the can half with custard and the rest with fruit, not leaving room for expansion.
- "Half frozen"This is the soft-serve stage, thick enough to hold a ribbon but still churnable. Fold the fruit and nuts in then, so they distribute without sinking, and finish in the freezer for several hours to harden.
- Alcohol and freezingBrandied fruit, brandy and wine all depress the freezing point. Keep the total added spirit modest, a quarter cup or so for a quart of custard, or the mixture will stay slushy no matter how long it churns.
- Fruit quantity"Make the freezer half full of custard and fill with fruit" reads as equal parts by volume, which is far more fruit than a modern palate wants and will make the ice hard to scoop. About 1 to 1 1/2 cups of mixed fruit and almonds per quart of custard gives the intended effect.
- Citron and blanched almondsCitron here is candied citron peel, sold with the baking fruit around the winter holidays; candied orange peel substitutes closely. Blanch almonds by pouring boiling water over them, slipping off the skins, then drying and chopping.
- Yield and servingA quart of custard plus fruit should serve roughly eight to ten. Move it from freezer to refrigerator for 15 minutes before serving; the brandy keeps it softer than plain ice cream, but it still firms up hard overnight.
The name is an anglicized spelling of plombières, the French frozen almond custard studded with candied fruit and steeped in kirsch or maraschino. Its origin is disputed: it is sometimes traced to the spa town of Plombières-les-Bains in the Vosges and sometimes to the lead (plomb) moulds in which such creams were set, and it is often said to have been made for Napoleon III, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in a Southern household book is a fair measure of how thoroughly French confectionery had entered the repertoire of Southern hostesses: the ingredients are largely shelf-stable imports, citron, almonds, wine and brandy, the sort of thing one imagines kept in a storeroom against company, and the labor looks like the labor of a household with someone available to turn a crank for half an hour. The brandied peaches are the local note, a standard summer put-up in Virginia kitchens and here folded into a Parisian dessert.