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Nesselrode Pudding
To Golden Parfait add one cup boiled chestnuts, mashed, one cup candied fruit soaked in wine, one cup chopped pineapple. Flavor with one teaspoon vanilla, one tablespoon sherry. Freeze, pack, mold, and serve with rum sauce.
A shorthand entry that assumes you have already made the book's Golden Parfait and know how to work a salt-and-ice freezer. The additions are simple; the base and the packing are where the work lies.
- The base it builds onThe book's own Golden Parfait, which the recipe assumes you have already made. A parfait of that type is generally an egg-yolk base: yolks beaten with hot sugar syrup until thick, cooled, then folded into whipped cream. Rich in fat and sugar and holding air from the cream, such a base sets smooth in a mold without churning. Work from the book's Golden Parfait entry for the actual method and quantities.
- Egg yolksThe hot syrup brings the yolks only part way, and a parfait is never cooked further. If that matters to you, cook the yolk-and-syrup base over a bain-marie to 160F before cooling, or use pasteurized yolks.
- ChestnutsOne cup boiled and mashed means unsweetened chestnuts cooked until fully tender and pushed through a sieve, not chestnut puree sweetened for confectionery. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, simmered a few minutes and sieved, are the practical substitute; if you use sweetened puree, cut the sugar in the parfait base.
- Candied fruit soaked in wineCandied fruit of the period typically meant citron, orange and lemon peel, cherries and angelica, chopped small. Soak an hour or more in sherry or madeira until pliable, then drain well before folding in; excess liquid, especially fortified wine, lowers the freezing point and gives a soft, grainy set.
- PineappleFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme that can soften and thin a dairy or egg base. Brief cooking deactivates it: cook the chopped pineapple a few minutes with a little sugar and cool it, or use canned pineapple, drained hard.
- Freeze, pack, moldIn the period this meant chilling the mixture in a can set in ice and rock salt, packing it into a lidded mold, and burying the mold in fresh ice and salt for a couple of hours to ripen. Modern equivalent: freeze the base until thick, fold in the solids, press into a chilled loaf pan or bombe mold with no air pockets, cover with film against the surface, and freeze at least four hours.
- UnmoldingDip the mold in warm water for a count of ten and turn it out onto a chilled plate. Return it to the freezer for fifteen minutes to firm the surface before slicing.
- Rum sauceThe recipe does not specify one. A thin sauce suits the pudding best: sugar syrup or a light custard with rum stirred in off the heat, served cold or barely warm. Keep the pour light; the pudding is already sweet.
- YieldThe additions alone come to three cups; the total depends on how much Golden Parfait the book's recipe makes, so size the mold once you have the base in front of you.
Nesselrode pudding is traditionally credited to Count Karl von Nesselrode, the Russian foreign minister who served Alexander I and Nicholas I, and is generally said to have been created by his chef in the first half of the nineteenth century; the frozen chestnut-and-candied-fruit pudding was already a standard of French and Anglo-American restaurant cookery by the 1860s. Chestnut puree bound into an iced custard with dried and candied fruits soaked in spirit was typical of the dish, though early versions varied, and it kept a place on Christmas and banquet menus in the United States well into the twentieth century, long enough that Nesselrode pie became a New York bakery fixture. Its appearance here, compressed into three lines that lean on an earlier parfait recipe, shows how thoroughly the dish had become common property in the American kitchen -- a name that needed no explanation, only a list of what to fold in.