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Nesselrode Pudding
1/2 teaspoon salt 1 pint thin cream 1/4 cup pineapple syrup 1½ cups prepared French chestnuts Make custard of first four ingredients, strain, cool, add cream, pineapple syrup, and chestnuts; then freeze. To prepare chestnuts, shell, cook in boiling water until soft, and force through a strainer. Line a two-quart melon mould with part of mixture; to remainder add one-half cup candied fruit cut in small pieces, one-quarter cup Sultana raisins, and eight chestnuts broken in pieces, first soaked several hours in Maraschino syrup. Fill mould, cover, pack in salt and ice, and let stand two hours. Serve with whipped cream, sweetened and flavored with Maraschino syrup.
The text as printed has lost part of its ingredient list, and one quantity is plainly a typesetting error. Read it as a frozen chestnut custard bombe and fill the gaps from the book's standard custard proportions.
- The missing ingredientsThe instruction says "make custard of first four ingredients," but of those four only the salt survives; what remains in the printed list (cream, pineapple syrup, chestnuts) is added later. A boiled custard of this scale would run to something like 1 cup milk or thin cream, 1/2 to 2/3 cup sugar and 4 egg yolks with the salt; cook to 170-175F over hot water, until it coats a spoon, then strain and chill.
- "11½ cups" chestnutsThis is a broken 1½ cups. Eleven and a half cups of chestnut purée against a pint of cream would be paste, not pudding, and would never fit a two-quart mould.
- French chestnutsLarge sweet European chestnuts, sold now as marrons. Fresh ones must be shelled and skinned before boiling; jarred or vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, simmered until soft and pressed through a sieve, save an hour and give the same result. Unsweetened chestnut purée also works; if the purée is sweetened, reduce the sugar.
- Pineapple and Maraschino syrupPineapple syrup means the sweet liquid from canned or candied pineapple. Maraschino syrup here is the true cherry liqueur or the syrup from liqueur-packed cherries, not the bright red juice from modern cocktail cherries, which is only sugar and flavoring.
- Freezing without a churn"Then freeze" means churning in a hand-crank freezer until stiff. An electric ice cream maker does the same. Failing that, freeze in a shallow pan and beat hard three or four times as it sets, before it hardens.
- Lining the mouldThe frozen mixture must be firm enough to hold a shell but soft enough to spread. Chill the mould first, press an even half-inch layer over the inside, then pack the fruited remainder into the middle so the sliced pudding shows a plain border around a studded center.
- Packing in salt and iceCrushed ice and rock salt, roughly three or four parts ice to one of salt, buried to the lid, ripens the pudding in the two hours the recipe allows. A modern freezer will firm it in several hours; press plastic wrap against the surface and cover the mould tightly.
- Unmoulding and yieldDip the closed mould in cold water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled platter. A two-quart mould serves ten to twelve; let it stand five minutes before slicing.
Nesselrode pudding is generally traced to Count Karl von Nesselrode, the Russian foreign minister who served Alexander I and Nicholas I, with the invention usually credited to his chef in the earlier nineteenth century; by the time Fannie Farmer was writing, the name had long since detached from the man and simply meant a frozen chestnut cream studded with candied fruit and raisins soaked in maraschino. It was a status dessert — chestnuts had to be peeled and sieved by hand, candied fruit was an imported luxury, and the ice had to be bought and packed with rock salt — and it sits here in this chapter alongside plainer water ices. Nesselrode survived into mid-twentieth-century America mainly as a pie filling and a commercial ice cream flavor, then faded.