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Frozen Pudding
3 cups milk 3 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon corn starch 1 cup chopped mixed fruit Scald milk in double boiler. Mix corn starch with a little cold milk; add well-beaten eggs, sugar and a few grains of salt; mix well and add slowly to scalded milk, stirring until it thickens. Cool and add fruit, which has been put through food chopper. The fruit is a matter of taste. It may be 2 tablespoons raisins, 1 tablespoon citron, 1 tablespoon cherries, 1 tablespoon blanched almonds, 1 tablespoon candied pineapple and a few currants. Freeze, but not too stiff; put into mold and pack in ice and salt.
A cooked cornstarch custard, frozen and molded — closer to what we would now call frozen custard or a semifreddo than to a baked pudding. The whole thing turns on how far you take the custard and how loose you leave it when it goes into the mold.
- Custard donenessIn the double boiler the mixture should coat a spoon and reach about 175-180F. The cornstarch protects it from curdling as readily as a plain custard would, but boiling hard will still give you a grainy set.
- "A few grains of salt"Read this as a scant 1/8 teaspoon. It is there for flavor, not structure, and matters more in a frozen mixture, since cold blunts sweetness and seasoning.
- Freezing without a churnThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, roughly 3 parts ice to 1 part rock salt by volume. A modern ice cream machine does the same job; failing that, freeze in a shallow pan and beat it thoroughly two or three times as it sets, or the texture goes to coarse crystals.
- "Not too stiff"This is the hinge. The mixture has to still be soft enough to pack into a mold without air pockets, then it firms up in the mold. If you churn it to scoopable stiffness first, it will not settle into the shape.
- Packing the moldPack the filled, tightly covered mold in ice and salt for 2 to 3 hours to ripen. A loaf pan or metal bowl in the freezer, covered with plastic against the surface, achieves the same result in about 4 hours.
- The fruit"Put through food chopper" means coarsely ground, not puréed — a few pulses in a food processor. Candied citron and candied pineapple are still sold at holiday baking counters; if citron is unavailable, candied orange peel is the nearest substitute. Soaking the dried fruit briefly in warm water or a spoonful of liquor keeps it from freezing into hard pellets.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 quarts, serving 8. Unmold onto a chilled plate and let it stand a few minutes before slicing.
Frozen puddings of this kind sat at the formal end of the American dessert repertoire in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a cooked custard, studded with the same candied fruit and nuts that went into a Christmas cake, frozen in a mold and turned out in slices. The style is often compared to French plombières, which likewise pairs a rich custard with candied fruit and kirsch. What makes this version domestic rather than professional is the tablespoon of cornstarch, standing in for a larger number of egg yolks. The instruction to "pack in ice and salt" is the real period marker: it presumes a household that bought ice by the block and kept coarse salt on hand for the freezer, a routine that mechanical refrigeration later erased.