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Plombiere Pudding
Four ounces of French cherries, 4 ounces candied lemon, orange peel, also citron and currants. Saturate them with rum. Next prepare the following custard: Two quarts of raw cream, 8 yolks and 12 ounces of sugar, make it after the manner of French ice cream. When frozen, incorporate the fruit and let stand for one hour. Then fill into melon molds, sprinkle with picked and washed currants and pack in ice until wanted. Serve with rum sauce.
A soda-fountain version of a classic French moulded ice cream, written for someone who already knows how to spin a custard base. The gaps are in technique rather than proportion.
- "After the manner of French ice cream"This is the hinge, and the book assumes you know it: a French base is a cooked custard. Scald the cream, temper it into the yolks and sugar, and cook to 170-175F until it coats a spoon, then chill thoroughly before churning. "Raw cream" here means fresh, unscalded cream at the start, not an uncooked finished base.
- French cherriesAlmost certainly candied or glace cherries, the imported sort. Modern glace cherries work; drain any syrup before the rum soak.
- Two kinds of currantsThe fruit steeped in rum is most likely dried Zante currants. The ones "picked and washed" for the outside of the mould read as fresh red currants, picked over and rinsed, used as a garnish rather than a mix-in, though the text does not say so outright.
- Candied peelThe four ounces may apply to each of the candied lemon, orange peel, citron and currants or to the mixture as a whole; the text does not settle it. Whichever way you read it, dice the whole candied citron and peel to about a quarter inch or they freeze into hard nuggets.
- The rum soakGive the fruit several hours, ideally overnight. Drain it before folding in — excess alcohol lowers the freezing point and the pudding will not set firm in the mould.
- Egg richnessEight yolks to two quarts of cream is four per quart, lean by current standards, where French-style bases commonly run around four to eight yolks per quart. Expect an icier, less unctuous result than a modern custard ice cream; add yolks if you want the familiar texture.
- Packing in iceThe original means a salt-and-ice bath around a sealed melon mould, roughly one part rock salt to three parts crushed ice, for two to three hours. A modern freezer at 0F does the same work; press plastic wrap onto the surface and unmould by dipping the form briefly in warm water.
- Rum sauceNot given here. A sugar syrup or thin custard flavoured with rum, served cold over the unmoulded pudding, would suit; the book leaves it to the reader.
- YieldTwo quarts of cream plus the fruit will fill two large melon moulds; figure roughly a dozen to sixteen servings depending on mould size.
Plombières is one of the older names in the French frozen repertoire: a custard ice cream bound with candied fruit soaked in kirsch or rum, moulded and turned out whole. The name is generally traced to the spa town of Plombières-les-Bains in the Vosges, and the dish is often said to have been created or popularised for Napoleon III, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in an American soda-fountain manual shows how far the confectioner's trade reached: a fountain of this era was not only a dispenser of carbonated drinks but a maker of ices, and the man behind the counter was expected to turn out moulded French desserts for banquets and private orders alongside the phosphates. The melon mould, the salt-and-ice pack and the assumption that "French ice cream" needs no further explanation all mark this as a professional's book rather than a housewife's.