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Plum Pudding Ice Cream
To Philadelphia Ice Cream add one cup dried and pounded Plum Pudding. Flavor with one tablespoon brandy. Freeze.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already have two things on hand: a batch of Philadelphia ice cream base and a leftover plum pudding. Both need unpacking before this makes sense.
- Philadelphia ice creamAn eggless base — cream, sugar and vanilla, churned without a cooked custard. Roughly 1 quart heavy cream (or cream cut with milk), 3/4 cup sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla, stirred until the sugar dissolves and chilled thoroughly before freezing. If you substitute a custard base you have French, not Philadelphia, ice cream, and the pudding will read as heavier still.
- Dried and pounded puddingThis is leftover steamed Christmas pudding, sliced thin and dried out in a slow oven until crisp, then crushed to coarse crumbs in a mortar or bag. Drying is the hinge: moist pudding crumbs freeze into hard cold lumps, while dried crumbs stay distinct and absorb a little cream. Do not skip it.
- One cup, packed howThe original does not say whether the cup is of pudding before or after pounding. Read it as a cup of finished crumbs, lightly packed, to a quart of base; more than that and the cream turns to sweet gravel.
- The brandyA tablespoon is mainly for flavour; alcohol does depress the freezing point, though at this quantity the effect on texture is slight. Substantially more would leave the mixture slower to set firm in a domestic machine.
- FreezingA 1907 kitchen would have meant a hand-crank pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt; period instructions commonly give something like three parts ice to one part salt by volume. In a modern churn, freeze the base to soft-serve consistency first, then add the crumbs and brandy in the last minute so the crumbs do not pulverise.
- RipeningPeriod practice was to repack the finished cream in ice and salt for an hour or two to firm and mellow it. The freezer equivalent is two to three hours in a covered container before serving.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten as a dessert course.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company of Boston, belongs to the era when a good cook was expected to know a base recipe by name and vary it in a sentence — hence the instruction to "add to Philadelphia Ice Cream" without repeating it. Philadelphia-style ice cream, made of sweetened cream alone, was already the American counterpoint to the egg-rich French custard style, and its plainness is exactly what makes it a good carrier for something as assertive as plum pudding. The dish itself reads as a thrift recipe dressed for company: a boiled or steamed Christmas pudding was made in quantity and kept well, and leftovers were put to use in other sweets after the holiday. Plum pudding ice cream turns up in turn-of-the-century American cookery, and Nesselrode pudding, its chestnut-and-dried-fruit relative, occupied similar territory on the frozen-dessert list.