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Lalla Rookh Pudding
Cut up some French cherries, apricots and angelique and pour over it some Madeira and stand in a hot place. Then make a mixture of French vanilla and freeze, leaving one cup of the liquid behind; when frozen hard enough add the fruit and some broken ladyfingers and finely crushed macaroons. Then let it stand and when firm fill in molds, imbed same in broken ice and salt for fully one hour. Next dissolve some gelatin in a little warm milk or water and add it to the remaining custard. When wanted for use, turn the pudding on the dish upon which it is to be served and sprinkle a little chopped fruit over it, then add some whipped cream with the previously prepared custard, flavored with Madeira or any liquor you desire, and pour it around the pudding.
A fountain-era frozen bombe written for someone who already knows how to freeze a custard, so quantities are almost entirely absent. Treat the text as a method and scale it to your mold.
- No quantities at allThe original assumes a working ice cream freezer and a cook who eyeballs fruit and cake. A workable scale is 1 quart of vanilla custard base, about 1 cup total chopped candied fruit, 6 ladyfingers and 4 macaroons, for a 1.5-quart mold serving eight.
- The hinge: reserve the cup before freezingOne cup of the unfrozen custard is set aside to become the sauce. Pull it off before the base goes into the freezer, not after, or you will be melting ice cream back down and the sauce will be thin and grainy.
- AngeliqueCandied angelica stem, sold in bright green lengths. Still made in France and by specialist confectioners; candied citron or candied lemon peel is the nearest substitute in both texture and function.
- French cherries and apricotsAlmost certainly not fresh fruit. In this company they read as glace or crystallised fruits, the sort sold for fruitcake. If they are syrupy, rinse and pat dry before you steep them, or the Madeira will slide off sugar rather than soak in.
- "Stand in a hot place"A warm spot on the back of the range, not a heat source. The point is to soften the candied fruit and let the Madeira penetrate. An hour at low warmth, or overnight at room temperature, does the same work.
- "French vanilla"An egg-yolk custard base as distinct from plain sweetened cream. Cook it to 170-180F before chilling and churning; the reserved cup goes into the sauce uncooked otherwise.
- Molding in ice and saltPacking the filled mold in crushed ice and coarse salt for an hour is a ripening and hardening step. A modern freezer at 0F will do the same, though it generally takes several hours for a mold this size; keep the mold covered to keep out ice crystals.
- The gelatin sauceVery little gelatin is wanted here, roughly half a teaspoon of powder bloomed and dissolved per cup of custard. The sauce should barely thicken, not set, since it is poured around a frozen pudding that will chill it further.
- UnmoldingDip the mold in warm water for a count of ten and invert onto a chilled dish. Sauce the plate after the pudding is turned out, never before.
The name comes from Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh, the 1817 verse romance set in Mughal India that was one of the runaway bestsellers of the century and lent its heroine's name to steamboats, racehorses and a great many desserts. By the late 1800s American confectioners and soda men attached it to two things in particular: a frozen pudding of this bombe type, and a rum-and-cream fountain drink. The pudding belongs to the same family as Nesselrode and other molded frozen desserts built from a custard, candied fruit steeped in fortified wine, and broken cake or macaroon, all packed in a mold and ripened in ice and salt.