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Diplomatic Ice Pudding
1 quart of rich vanilla custard. 1 pint thick cream. 1 cupful of French candied pineapple and cherries, cut small. 2 dozen lady fingers. Freeze the custard as usual for ice cream; whip the cream, put it in and freeze again.
Take two brick molds and put in a layer of the ice cream, a layer of lady fingers, then some candied fruit, and fill the mold that way, having ice cream for the top layer. Close with paper and the lid, and put in the freezing mixture to stay two or three hours. Manage the same way as Neapolitan and
A frozen bombe built in layers rather than a baked pudding. The one thing to get right is the ice cream itself: it must be churned and still soft enough to spread, then packed and hardened in the mold, or the layers will not knit and the pudding will collapse when turned out.
- "Rich vanilla custard"A cooked egg custard base; the book gives no formula, assuming the house custard is already on hand. A modern working version would be about 1 quart of milk and cream with 6-8 yolks and 3/4 cup sugar, cooked until it thickens and chilled thoroughly before churning.
- "Freeze as usual for ice cream"Churn in an ice cream maker until thick but still soft. The whipped cream is folded in and the mixture churned or stirred briefly again; do not let it harden before molding.
- Brick moldsRectangular tinned metal molds with a close-fitting lid. Loaf pans lined with plastic wrap will stand in, though they are usually larger than a period brick and you lose the lid's seal.
- "The freezing mixture"Crushed ice and coarse salt, about three parts ice to one part salt by volume, packed around the buried mold. A home freezer will do the job but expect to allow longer than the two or three hours given here; the paper under the lid kept brine out.
- Lady fingersA dry sponge finger; commercial savoiardi are a serviceable modern substitute. Lay them in whole or trimmed to fit rather than crumbled; they soften into the cream as it hardens.
- Candied fruitA cupful, cut small. French candied pineapple and cherries are still sold as glace fruit; drain and pat any syrupy fruit dry so it does not freeze into hard beads.
- Unmolding and servingDip the mold briefly in warm water, invert, and slice with a warmed knife. Two filled bricks make a quantity aimed at a table of guests rather than a family dessert.
- The truncated endingThe text breaks off mid-sentence, at a cross-reference to the Neapolitan method; presumably the same business of packing the sealed mold in ice and salt, then unmolding and slicing to show the layers.
The name points to pouding à la diplomate, a French pudding of ladyfingers or sponge layered with candied fruit and custard. The iced version here belongs to the age of the ice-and-salt freezer, when confectioners and hotel pastry cooks could turn out molded frozen desserts in quantity and prized them precisely because they held their shape through a long dinner. That is the trade the recipe speaks to, which is why it assumes brick molds, a standing custard, and a cook who already knows what the Neapolitan method is.