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Frozen Sponge Pudding
Break up 10 ounces of ladyfingers, place them in a kettle and add 3 pints of boiled cream or milk, 10 yolks and 10 ounces of sugar, stew this for about ten minutes without coming to a boil, then remove and let cool. Then strain into the freezer and add 1 quart of raw cream and a good flavoring of orange flower water and freeze. Next prepare the molds (melon molds are generally used for this pudding) the following way: Pack them in crushed ice, well salted, then line the mold with French vanilla ice cream or pistachio ice cream, place a layer of ladyfingers, dipped in maraschino, next a layer of the frozen custard, then a layer of different kinds of chopped preserved French fruit, then again a layer of custard, and so on until the mold is nearly full, then for the top spread over the same cream as used for the mold lining. Then pack in ice and salt for at least one hour; serve with rum sauce. This consists of vanilla cream sufficiently beaten in order to get it smooth, with an addition of whipped double cream and a strong flavoring of rum.
This is a bombe glacée written for a soda fountain with a brine-packed ice cave and a hand-crank freezer. The custard base is sound; nearly everything about the equipment and the scale needs translating.
- Scale firstThree pints of milk plus a quart of raw cream plus ten yolks yields something on the order of three to four quarts of frozen custard, before the lining ice cream and the layers. That is fountain volume. A quarter of the recipe is about a quart, roughly a mold-sized batch.
- The hinge: never let the custard boilTen yolks in that much dairy will curdle the moment it simmers. Cook to 175-180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon, then strain and chill hard before churning. The ten minutes in the original is a guide, not a target.
- "Raw cream"This means uncooked cream, added to the cooled custard rather than heated with it, not unpasteurized cream. Heavy or whipping cream is the equivalent.
- Freezer and molds"Strain into the freezer" means a churn packed with crushed ice and rock salt; any modern ice cream machine does the job. A "melon mold" is a ribbed, melon-shaped mold in two fitted parts. Lacking one, use a stainless bowl or loaf pan lined with plastic wrap, and set it in the freezer rather than in a salted ice bath.
- Ripening timeOne hour packed in ice and salt was enough for a fountain that would serve it immediately. In a home freezer at 0F, give the assembled mold at least four hours, and let it stand ten minutes before unmolding so the lining releases.
- FlavoringsOrange flower water is still sold, and is potent: start with a teaspoon per quart. Maraschino here means the dry Italian cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries.
- Preserved French fruitCandied or glacé fruit -- apricot, cherry, angelica, citron, pear. Chop fine and soak briefly in a little of the maraschino so it does not freeze into gravel.
- The rum sauce"Vanilla cream" in fountain usage is vanilla ice cream; beaten smooth and slackened with whipped cream and rum, it becomes a pourable frozen sauce. Mix it just before serving, since it separates as it warms.
Iced puddings of this kind are French in ancestry -- the bombe of the nineteenth-century pâtissier, a mold lined with one ice cream and filled with a second mixture, layered with liqueur-soaked biscuit and candied fruit. What is distinctly American is where it turns up: what appears to be a trade manual for soda fountains, alongside phosphates and sundaes. Between roughly 1890 and Prohibition, the better fountains competed with restaurants and hotel dining rooms, and their dispensers were expected to build elaborate frozen desserts to order from ice creams already on hand; the recipe, for its part, assumes a supply of vanilla and pistachio in the cabinet rather than telling you to make them. The ice-and-salt packing described here was the usual means of refrigeration; mechanical freezing cabinets seem not to have become standard fountain equipment until the 1920s and 30s.