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Ice-Box Pudding
Blanche Osborne. 1 C butter 1 C granulated sugar Cream together 20 minutes, then add 4 eggs, one at time, beating 5 minutes after each one 1½ cake sweet chocolate, melted 3 or 4 doz lady fingers Arrange lady fingers with filling in a mold and let stand over night in refrigerator. Serve with whipped cream.
Mrs. Forrest Thomsen.
This is a raw-egg icebox cake: the butter, sugar, egg and chocolate filling is never heated at any stage, only chilled overnight between layers of lady fingers. That is the reason it cannot be recommended as written.
- The eggs are never cookedFour whole eggs go into the creamed butter and sugar and the mold goes straight to the refrigerator. Nothing in the method brings the eggs above refrigerator temperature, so there is no step that would kill Salmonella if any egg carries it. A current recipe using pasteurized eggs or a cooked custard base should be used instead.
- Overnight holding makes it worse, not betterOvernight holding does not fix anything -- The long rest is what sets the pudding, but a sugar-and-butter filling is not acidic or salty enough to be self-preserving, and chilling only slows bacterial growth rather than destroying it. Whatever is present at mixing is still present at serving, and the dish is then served cold with more uncooked dairy on top.
- No cooking, no fix by substitution aloneMelting the chocolate does not pasteurize anything: the eggs are beaten into the creamed butter and sugar first, and the small amount of melted chocolate stirred in afterward cannot bring the mass to a safe temperature. There is no point in the original sequence where heat reaches the eggs.
- What "sweet chocolate" meantA "cake" of sweet chocolate was a sweetened dark eating chocolate sold in tablets; sizes varied by brand and period, so 1½ cakes cannot be converted to a precise weight with confidence. Unsweetened baking squares are not the same thing and would throw the sugar balance off badly.
- The creaming times are literalTwenty minutes of creaming and five minutes of beating after each egg are as written, and would suit an electric mixer or a very patient arm. Presumably they are meant to dissolve the granulated sugar and aerate a filling that is never cooked.
Icebox puddings and icebox cakes belong to the first decades of domestic mechanical refrigeration, roughly the 1920s onward, when a reliably cold box in the kitchen made a dessert that set without gelatin, baking or an ice-cream freezer practical. The usual formula is a rich uncooked butter-sugar-egg cream, often chocolate, packed in a mold with lady fingers, macaroons or later graham crackers, and left overnight so the biscuit softens into cake. Community cookbooks circulated such recipes widely, since they required no oven judgment and could be made the day before, and the double attribution here -- "Blanche Osborne" as the source, "Mrs. Forrest Thomsen" as the contributor -- shows a favorite recipe passing from one cook to another before it reached print. Food-safety guidance on raw shell eggs is a much later development, and the confidence of the original instructions reflects a period when the risk was simply not on the page.