Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › Frozen Plum Pudding
Frozen Plum Pudding
¼ teaspoon salt 1/4 cup sherry 2½ cups cream ¾ cup candied fruit ½ cup almonds, blanched and chopped 1/3 cup Sultana raisins 1/2 cup pounded macaroons Make custard of milk, one-half the sugar, egg yolks, and salt. Caramelize the remaining sugar and add. Strain, cool, add remaining ingredients, freeze, and mould. If a baked ice cream is desired, use whites of eggs for meringue, Baked Alaska (see p. 448).
Frozen Charlotte Glacé Mould ice cream in brick form or one-half pound bakingpowder boxes. Remove from mould or moulds, and surround with lady fingers, trimmed to come to top of cream. Cover top with whipped cream, sweetened and flavored, and pipe cream between lady fingers. Baking-powder boxes are used when individual service is desired, the cream being cut in halves crosswise.
An iced bombe dressed as a Christmas pudding: caramel custard ice cream loaded with dried fruit, nuts and crushed macaroons. The hinge is the caramel, which must be dark enough to taste of something before it goes into the custard.
- The custard baseThe milk, sugar and egg-yolk amounts for the base are not recoverable from the entry as it stands here. Use a proportion you trust for a boiled custard ice cream base, reserving half the sugar for the caramel, as the recipe directs.
- Caramelizing the sugarMelt the reserved sugar dry in a heavy pan until it is the color of an old penny, then stir it into the hot strained custard. It will hiss and seize; keep stirring off the heat until it dissolves. Stopping the caramel too pale gives sweetness with no flavor.
- Sultana raisinsThese are golden raisins. Soak them and the candied fruit in the sherry for an hour before mixing so they do not freeze into gravel.
- Pounded macaroonsNot the coconut kind. The book means the dry almond macaroon, closest today to Italian amaretti; crush them coarsely so some texture survives the freezing.
- Ambiguous quantitiesTwo figures in the ingredient list have lost their fractions. Read the salt as 1/4 teaspoon and the candied fruit as 3/4 cup, which is in proportion to the 2 1/2 cups cream.
- FreezingWritten for a hand-crank pail; period books generally pack three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt. A modern machine works, but churn the base plain and fold the fruit, nuts and macaroons in at the end, or the paddle will pulverize them.
- Moulding and ripeningPack the churned cream into a chilled mould, cover tightly, and hold it in the freezer at least four hours to firm and let the flavors settle. Dip the mould briefly in warm water to unmould.
- Alcohol and hardnessA quarter cup of sherry in this volume softens the set slightly, which is desirable, but do not increase it or the pudding will not hold a moulded shape.
- YieldHard to state, since the base quantities are missing; expect somewhere near 1 1/2 quarts. The lady-finger treatment described after the freezing instructions belongs to Frozen Charlotte Glace, a separate dish.
Frozen plum pudding is often associated with late-nineteenth-century America, though versions appear in American and French cookery writing well before then: the heavy steamed Christmas pudding of the English tradition, with its brandy, candied peel and raisins, recast as a moulded ice for a season when the dining room was already warm from a long dinner. Confectioners' bombes moulded in fanciful shapes were fashionable, and cookbooks of the period offered them alongside the older boiled puddings rather than in place of them. The macaroon crumbs do the work that breadcrumbs and suet do in the baked original, giving body to something that would otherwise be plain fruit ice cream, and the burnt-sugar caramel supplies the dark color a plum pudding is expected to have.