Nebuchadnezzar
king of Babylon, a great name in the chronology of the table. He invented salads, was accused of eating grass, and like most originals was said to be mad.
NECTARINE is a smooth peach, and there are not a few who maintain that it is the best of all peaches. It is a curious fact that on a peach tree, not only may branches be found bearing the nectarine perfect in every way, but also on the same branch fruits will appear which are peach on one side and nectarine on the other. Botanists are unable to tell what makes the difference.
NESSELRODE PUDDING was invented many years ago by Mony, cook to the famous Count Nesselrode. When Carême heard of this, which is perhaps the most perfect of the iced puddings, he almost burst with envy. He could not but praise the pudding-but he declared that Mony took the idea of it from the chestnut pudding invented by himself. Moreover, he upbraided Mony for conferring the name of a foreigner upon so good a pudding. All the good cooks, he insisted, are French, and therefore all the good names should be French too. Carême, however skilful as a cook, was a blazing cox- Nesselrode Pudding comb; he gave the names of his physician and private friends to many of his dishes, and he fancied that the world would care enough for his decree to accept these names for ever. Surely if Mony had a right to accept service with Count Nesselrode, he had a perfect right to give his patron's name to the great work of art which he evolved under his roof. The following receipt is transcribed from Gouffé, who announces that he had it direct from his old friend Mony :- "Peel forty chestnuts; blanch them in boiling water for five minutes; peel off the second skin, and put them in a stewpan with a quart of syrup at 16°, and a stick of vanilla. Simmer gently till the chestnuts are done, drain and press them through a fine hair sieve. "Put eight yolks of egg in a stewpan with half a pound of pounded sugar and a quart of boiled cream. Stir over the fire without boiling till the egg begins to thicken. Add the chestnut purée, and press the whole through a tammy cloth into a basin, and add a gill of Maraschino. "Stone one quarter-pound of raisins and wash and pick one quarter-pound of currants. Cook both together in one half-gill of syrup at 30° and one gill of water; drain, and let them cool. "Put a freezing pot in the ice; pour in the chestnut cream and work it with the spatula; when it is partly frozen, add three gills of whipt cream, and continue working with the spatula until the cream is frozen; then add the currants and raisins, and put the pudding into an icemould; close it, and put some butter on the opening, to prevent any salt or water penetrating inside; embed the mould in ice, and let it remain there for two hours. "Make the sauce as follows: Put three gills of boiled cream in a stewpan, with eight yolks of egg and a quarterpound of pounded sugar; stir over the fire without boiling till the egg begins to thicken; take off the fire, and stir for three minutes more. Strain the custard through a Nowell tammy cloth and add half a gill of Maraschino. Put the sauce on the ice until it is very cold, without freezing. Turn the pudding out of the mould on to a napkin on a dish; and serve with the sauce in a boat."
This is the most insidious of puddings, and it was a matter of necessity to give it the name of some great diplomatist. The quantities as above rendered are large, but it is easy to take a half, a third, or a fourth.
The entry is a dictionary page, but the middle of it is a complete iced pudding — a chestnut custard churned in an ice pail, moulded, and served with a cold crème anglaise. A few of its measurements need translating before you start.
- Syrup "at 16°" and "at 30°"These are degrees Baumé, the sugar-density scale of nineteenth-century French pastry, read with a hydrometer. 16° Baumé is a light syrup of roughly 30 per cent sugar by weight (about 1 part sugar to 2 parts water); 30° Baumé is a heavy syrup of roughly 55 per cent (near equal weights of sugar and water). Without a saccharometer these are approximations, so taste the poaching liquid rather than trusting the arithmetic.
- Gills and quartsKettner's is a London book, so a gill is an imperial quarter-pint, 5 fl oz, and a quart is 40 fl oz. Three gills of whipped cream means about 1 3/4 US cups of cream, measured before whipping.
- Forty chestnutsAround 2 lb in the shell, or a little over 1 lb peeled. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work and spare you the second skin, which is the tedious part; reduce the initial blanching accordingly.
- Do not let either custard boilBoth the pudding base and the sauce are stirred over heat "without boiling till the egg begins to thicken" — that is 175-180F. Past about 185F the yolks curdle and no amount of tammying will hide it. A heavy pan and a thermometer are more use here than nerve.
- Tammy cloth and hair sieveA tammy was a fine worsted straining cloth wrung between two people. A fine-mesh conical sieve, or a blitz in a blender followed by a sieve, gives the same result: the chestnut purée must be entirely smooth or the frozen pudding turns gritty.
- The freezing potThe original is churned by hand with a spatula in a metal pail set in ice and salt (the recipe's warning about salt penetrating the mould shows salt was used). An ice cream machine does this better; churn until thick, fold in the whipped cream and then the dried fruit, and pack into a chilled mould.
- Moulding and "two hours in ice"A domestic freezer replaces the ice-and-salt burial, but the pudding needs longer than two hours to set firm enough to unmould — four to six. Line the mould with cling film rather than sealing the seam with butter, and dip it briefly in warm water to turn out.
- MaraschinoThe intended spirit is dry maraschino distilled from marasca cherries and their stones, not the sweet red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Luxardo or a similar Italian bottling is the direct descendant.
- YieldAs written this is a party dish for twelve to sixteen. The closing line is sound advice: a quarter quantity, using 2 egg yolks and 10 chestnuts, fits a 1-quart mould.
Nesselrode pudding is credited, here and by Gouffe, to Mony (or Monny), chef to Count Karl Robert von Nesselrode, the Russian foreign minister who served at the Congress of Vienna and remained chancellor into the 1850s - hence the joke that so "insidious" a sweet needed the name of a diplomatist. The receipt reaches this page at second hand: Jules Gouffe, the great codifier of French kitchen practice, printed it saying he had it from Mony himself, and Kettner's copies Gouffe. Careme's grumble that the honour belonged to his own chestnut pudding is repeated in Victorian food writing and should be treated as trade gossip rather than documented fact, though his habit of naming dishes after his patrons and physicians is real enough. The pudding was a familiar item on grand English menus in the later nineteenth century, when moulded ices were a standard climax of a dinner, and its ghost survived into the twentieth century as the rum-and-candied-fruit Nesselrode pie of New York bakeries. The surrounding entry is characteristic of Kettner's Book of the Table (1877): a dictionary in which a genuine professional recipe sits between an anecdote about Nebuchadnezzar and a note on peach trees bearing nectarines, the bud mutation that puzzled its botanists and is now understood as a change in a single gene governing skin fuzz.