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Frozen Fig Pudding
Figs cut small and mixed in caramel ice cream and frozen in brick molds in a most excellent combination--a modified tutti frutti. 1 quart of milk. 8 yolks of eggs. 14 ounces of sugar. 1 pound of figs. The caramel gives the flavor, but half a cupful of curacoa improves it. Take four tablespoonfuls of the sugar to make caramel, put it into a saucepan or frying-pan over the fire without any water, and let it melt and become a medium molasses color, not burnt, however, then pour in half a cupful of water, and let boil and dissolve.
Make rich boiled custard of the milk, sugar and yolks, pour the caramel into it, strain into the freezer, and freeze as usual. Cut the figs small as raisins and mix them in--Put the frozen pudding into Neapolitan molds, and bed them in ice and salt for two hours.
A caramel custard ice cream studded with chopped figs, moulded into bricks. The recipe assumes a hand-cranked freezer and a professional pastry kitchen, but nothing in it is beyond a home cook with an ice cream machine and a loaf pan.
- The hinge: caramel colourDry sugar goes from medium molasses colour to acrid in a matter of seconds. Pull the pan off the heat while it is still amber and add the half cup of water at arm's length — it will spit violently. Burnt caramel will dominate the whole quart and cannot be corrected.
- Quantities in cups14 ounces of sugar is about 2 cups, of which 4 tablespoons are diverted to the caramel. One quart of milk is 4 cups; the custard is rich by volume of yolks rather than cream, so expect a firm, slightly eggy ice cream rather than a modern high-fat one.
- Cook the custard to temperature"Rich boiled custard" in period usage generally means a stirred custard, not one brought to a rolling boil. Hold it over moderate heat, stirring, until it coats a spoon and reads 175-180F; above about 185F the yolks begin to curdle. Straining, as the recipe directs, catches any threads of set egg.
- CuracaoHalf a cupful of orange curacao in a quart of custard is a substantial dose of alcohol and will slow freezing noticeably. Add it after the custard has chilled, and consider cutting it to a quarter cup if your machine struggles to firm up.
- The figsDried figs are probably meant, since they are to be cut to raisin size. Stem them first, and if they are hard, plump them in warm water or a little of the curacao and drain well — dry chunks freeze to gravel. The recipe mixes them in after freezing, so fold them in at the end of churning rather than into the liquid custard.
- Brick and Neapolitan moldsThese are rectangular tin molds with tight lids, used to turn out a block that slices cleanly. A metal loaf pan lined with parchment, pressed and covered, does the same job.
- Bedding in ice and saltTwo hours packed in crushed ice with coarse salt is the period method for hardening the pudding to slicing firmness. A modern freezer at 0F does it in three to four hours, longer if you used the full measure of liqueur.
- YieldRoughly 1.5 quarts before the figs go in, near 2 quarts after — enough to fill more than one brick mold, which is why the recipe speaks of molds in the plural.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the late nineteenth-century trade literature written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which is why the instructions assume a freezer and molds already at hand. The dish sits in a family of moulded frozen desserts that American cooks called puddings even when no flour or steaming was involved: cut fruit suspended in custard ice, packed in a brick and cut across into slices. "Tutti frutti" — literally all fruits — was a common name for such mixtures, and the author's aside that this is a "modified tutti frutti" places it in a repertoire his readers would already know. Dried figs travelled and stored well, which made them a dependable winter fruit for this kind of work, and curacao was among the flavouring liqueurs a pastry cook of the era might keep on the shelf alongside maraschino and kirsch.