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Frozen Plum Pudding
½ C seeded raisins 1/2 C nuts 3 slices pineapple 1/2 C maraschino cherries 1/2 C currants Cook sugar and water until it hairs; pour over stiffly beaten egg whites and beat until cold. Whip cream very stiff. Beat all together, then add nuts chopped, pineapple cut fine, cherries, currants and raisins. (Plump currants and raisins with hot water and drain). Pack in freezer or electric ice box for three hours or longer. Serves 18 people. 1 C sugar 2 C boiling water 2 C orange juice
This is an Italian meringue folded into whipped cream with candied and dried fruit, then still-frozen — a frozen "plum pudding" in name only. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete and jumbled, so read the whole thing before starting.
- "Until it hairs"This is the thread stage, about 230-235F on a candy thermometer: a drizzle from the spoon draws out into a fine hair that holds briefly in the air. With 1 cup sugar to 2 cups boiling water you will be reducing for a long while; measuring the temperature is far more reliable than watching the thread.
- Missing quantitiesThe recipe never says how many egg whites or how much cream. For the fruit and syrup given, figure on 4 egg whites and 1 pint of heavy cream whipped stiff. Treat those as reconstruction, not as the original's intent.
- The orange juiceTwo cups of orange juice appear in the ingredient list and are never used in the method. Where it was meant to go cannot be recovered from the page as printed. If you add it to the meringue-cream mixture it will thin it badly, so hold it back.
- Meringue must be coldBeat the syruped whites until the bowl is cool to the touch before the cream goes in. Warm meringue deflates whipped cream on contact and the pudding freezes into a dense, icy brick instead of a light one.
- Egg whitesThread-stage syrup warms the whites but does not reliably pasteurize them, and nothing here is cooked afterward. Use pasteurized egg whites if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
- "Pack in freezer or electric ice box""Freezer" here means a hand-crank ice-cream freezer packed with ice and salt; the "electric ice box" is an early refrigerator with a small frozen compartment. In a modern freezer, pack the mixture into a loaf pan or mould, cover tightly, and give it four to six hours. Because it is meringue-and-cream based it needs no churning, but it will set harder than the original ever did — let it stand 10 to 15 minutes before slicing.
- Maraschino cherriesThe bright red cherries of this era were preserved in flavoured syrup much as they are now, but the drained weight is what matters: blot them well or the colour bleeds pink streaks through the pudding.
- Plumping the fruitDo the hot-water soak on the currants and raisins first and drain them thoroughly, then dry them. Wet fruit throws ice crystals through the whole pudding.
- YieldEighteen servings assumes small, rich slices. Made in a standard 9x5 loaf pan it will give closer to ten portions.
Frozen plum pudding is an American answer to a British problem: the traditional Christmas pudding is a boiled, suet-heavy affair that few people want after a large winter dinner, so late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cooks kept the raisins, currants and candied fruit and moved the whole idea into the ice. The result belongs to a family of frozen desserts — biscuit glacé, frozen mousses, Nesselrode pudding — that were prized because they could be made ahead and needed no oven. The mention of an "electric ice box" as an alternative to a crank freezer suggests a date in the years when mechanical refrigeration was reaching home kitchens but had not yet displaced ice and salt.