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Frozen Nesselrode Pudding
Glace Nesselrode or iced pudding. A frozen custard made of pounded chestnuts, with fruit and flavorings: 1 pound of large chestnuts--about 40. 1 pint of rich boiled custard. 1 cup sweet cream. 2 ounces citron. 2 ounces sultana raisins. 2 ounces stewed pineapple. 1/2 cupful of maraschino. 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. Pinch of salt in the chestnut pulp.
Slit the shells of the chestnuts, boil them half an hour, peel clean, and pound the nuts to a paste, and rub it through a coarse sieve, moistening with cream. Then mix it with the boiled custard. Freeze this mixture, and when firm whip the cup of cream, and stir it in and freeze again. Then add the citron cut in shreds, the stewed or candied pineapple, likewise the raisins, maraschino, and vanilla extract. Beat up and freeze again, and either serve in ice cream plates out of the freezer, or pack the cream in a mold, and when well frozen send to table whole, turned out of the mold on to a folded napkin on a dish.
The foregoing makes about enough to fill one of those brick molds that have a large and deep stamped fruit pattern in the lid and when frozen firm it can be sliced into from 12 to 16 portions. When chestnuts are not convenient some of the large cafes use the ready prepared pounded almonds or walnuts that may be bought by the can at the confectioners' supply stores, and various additions or substitutions of green candied fruits are employed to make a handsome appearing compound without changing its general character. Should be trebled in quantity for dinner for fifty.
A chestnut ice cream in the grand hotel manner, built for a brick mold and a dinner service. The chestnut work is the labor; everything else is straightforward if you own a churn.
- ChestnutsA pound of in-shell chestnuts yields roughly 12 oz of peeled nut. Peel them while still hot — the inner skin sets like paper once cooled. Vacuum-packed peeled cooked chestnuts, or about 1½ cups of unsweetened chestnut purée, substitute directly; sweetened crème de marrons does not, as the custard is already sugared.
- "Rich boiled custard"A stirred crème anglaise, not a baked one: egg yolks, sugar and milk or cream cooked to about 175–180°F, thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Chill it thoroughly before churning or the mixture will never take.
- MaraschinoThe dry, clear cherry liqueur from Dalmatian marasca cherries, not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Half a cup in roughly a quart of base is a substantial dose of alcohol, which will keep the mixture softer than it would otherwise freeze and means it needs a long spell in the freezer to set firm enough to slice.
- Three freezings, one churnThe repeated freezing belongs to a hand-crank tub packed with ice and rock salt, where the paddle could be lifted out and the mass beaten back up. In a modern machine: churn the chestnut custard once, fold in the whipped cream, liqueur, vanilla and fruit by hand at the soft-serve stage, then transfer to the mold and harden. Adding the fruit and liqueur before churning slows freezing badly.
- Citron and candied fruitCitron here is candied citron peel, sold in shreds or blocks at holiday time; candied pineapple stands in for the stewed. Chop everything fine — large lumps of candied fruit freeze into hard nuggets that ruin a slice.
- The brick moldA quart to a quart and a half. Any loaf pan lined with plastic wrap will do; press the mixture in with no air pockets, cover the surface flush, and freeze overnight. Unmold by dipping the outside briefly in warm water.
- Yield and service12 to 16 slices as written. Let the brick stand 10 minutes in the refrigerator before slicing; straight from a modern freezer at 0F it will be very hard.
Nesselrode pudding is named for Count Karl von Nesselrode, the Russian foreign minister who served Tsars Alexander I and Nicholas I; the dish is traditionally credited to his chef, usually given as Mouy, working in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century. The defining element is chestnut -- the frozen chestnut custard studded with candied fruit and steeped in maraschino became a fixture of formal European and American menus and stayed on hotel and restaurant lists well into the twentieth century. The closing note that the recipe "should be trebled in quantity for dinner for fifty," and the frank advice that large cafes buy canned pounded almonds or walnuts when chestnuts are inconvenient, mark this as trade writing for men producing banquet desserts at volume rather than for a home kitchen.