Iced - Pudding
INGREDIENTS. lb. of sweet almonds, 2 oz. of bitter ones, lb. of sugar, 8 eggs, 1½ pint of milk, a few slices of citron or preserved cherries. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Blanch and dry the almonds thoroughly in a cloth, then pound them in a mortar ICED-PUDDING MOULD. until reduced to a smooth paste; add to these the eggs, well beaten, the sugar and milk; stir these ingredients over the fire until they thicken, but do not allow them to boil; then strain and put the mixture into the freezing-pot: surround it with ice and freeze it. When quite frozen, fill an iced-pudding mould, put on the lid and keep the pudding in ice until required for table; then turn it out on the dish. This pudding may be flavoured with vanilla, curaçoa or maraschino.
TIME.- hour to freeze the mixture.
SEASONABLE.-Served all the year round.
Ices. Ices are composed, it is scarcely necessary to say, of congealed cream or water, combined sometimes with liqueurs or other flavouring ingredients, or more generally with the juices of fruits. At ICES, TO MAKE. desserts, "At Home" teas in summer, and at dances, ices are scarcely to be dispensed with. The principal utensils required for making ice-creams are ice-tubs, freezingpots, spaddles and a cellaret. The tub must be large enough to contain about a bushel of ice, pounded small, when brought out of the ice-house, and mixed very carefully with either salt, nitre or soda. The freezing-pot is best made of pewter. If it be of tin, as is sometimes the case, the congelation goes on too rapidly in it for the thorough intermingling of its contents, on which the excellence of the ice greatly depends. The spaddle is generally made of copper, kept bright and clean. The cellaret is a tin vessel, in which ices are kept for a short time from dissolving.
The method to be pursued in the freezing process must be attended to. When the ice-tub is prepared with fresh pounded ice and salt, the freezing-pot is put into it up to its cover. The articles to be congealed are then poured into it and covered over; but to prevent the ingredients from separating and the heaviest of them from falling to the bottom of the mould, it is requisite to turn the freezingpot round and round by the handle, so as to keep its contents moving until the congelation commences. As soon as this is perceived (the cover of the pot being occasionally taken off for the purpose of noticing when freezing takes place), the cover is immediately closed over it, ice is put upon it, and it is left in this state till it is served. The use of the spaddle is to stir up and remove from the side of the freezing-pot the cream, which in the shaking may have washed against it, and by stirring it in with the rest, to prevent waste of it occurring. Any negligence in stirring the contents of the freezing-pot before congelation takes place will destroy the whole: either the sugar sinks to the bottom and leaves the ice insufficiently sweetened, or lumps are formed, which disfigure and discolour it.
This is a frozen almond custard from the era of the hand-turned pewter freezing-pot, and it turns on an ingredient that is no longer sold for eating. The notes below explain why the recipe cannot be followed today rather than how to adapt it.
- Bitter almonds are the problemThe 2 oz of bitter almonds are the flavouring the recipe is built around, and they contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding to a paste and stirring into milk does. Two ounces is several dozen kernels, and the custard is deliberately never boiled, so nothing drives off the volatile cyanide. Raw bitter almonds cannot be sold as food in the United States, and hydrocyanic acid levels are regulated in Europe; if you want a marzipan-scented ice, use a current recipe built on almond extract.
- The quantities are broken in the source textThe fractions before "lb. of sweet almonds" and "lb. of sugar" have dropped out of the printed page, as has the time ("- hour to freeze"). The recipe as it stands does not specify how much almond or sugar to use, so it is not reproducible even setting the bitter almonds aside.
- The custard is not cooked to a safe temperatureEight eggs are stirred into milk and heated only until they thicken, with an explicit instruction not to boil. A modern egg custard is taken to about 160-170F and held there; "until it thickens" over an open fire is not a temperature, and the mixture then sits chilled for hours before service.
- Nitre in the ice tubThe general note suggests mixing the pounded ice with "salt, nitre or soda." Nitre is potassium nitrate — saltpetre — used here purely as a freezing-point depressant outside the pot. It is not food-grade practice today, and plain rock salt does the same job.
- The vesselsA bushel of pounded ice is roughly 8 gallons by volume. The freezing-pot is a lidded metal canister set in the ice and turned by hand — a sorbetière; the spaddle is the scraper that clears frozen custard off its walls. The cellaret, as the text describes it, is a tin vessel in which ices are held briefly without melting.
- Curaçoa and maraschinoThe suggested flavourings are period spellings of curaçao, the bitter-orange liqueur, and maraschino, the clear cherry-stone liqueur — not the sweet syrup that modern cocktail cherries are packed in.
Iced puddings — ice cream frozen in a shaped, lidded mould and turned out whole at table — were a fixture of Victorian dessert service, and the almond version was among the standards. The bitter almond was the era's workhorse marzipan flavouring: cooks used a small proportion of it against a larger quantity of sweet almonds precisely because it carried the intense scent that sweet almonds lack. That the danger was already understood is clear from nineteenth-century poisoning literature, which regularly records deaths from essence of bitter almonds; the culinary books of the same decades went on calling for the nuts by the ounce. The elaborate apparatus described in the accompanying note on ices — the bushel of pounded ice, the pewter pot, the copper spaddle, the tin cellaret — belongs to the years before mechanical refrigeration, when a household that served ices was announcing that it had access to an ice-house or to the commercial ice trade, and staff to turn the pot by hand.