Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › University Pudding
University Pudding
Prepare same as Frozen Tom and Jerry. Freeze to a mush, add one cup mixed fruit which has been soaked in brandy to cover for twelve hours, using glacé cherries, Sultana raisins, sliced citron, and candied pineapple; then finish freezing. Serve in small beer jugs, and garnish with cream, whipped, sweetened, and flavored. ¾ cup sugar
A frozen egg-and-spirit custard studded with brandied candied fruit, built on another recipe in the same chapter. Read the Frozen Tom and Jerry entry first, since almost all the substance of this dish is there.
- The stray line of typeThe "34 cup sugar" at the end is almost certainly a mangled rendering of ¾ cup sugar. Where it belongs is not clear from the page: it may be part of the base mixture or a fragment carried over from an adjacent recipe. Take your sugar quantity from the Frozen Tom and Jerry recipe itself.
- Soak the fruit aheadTwelve hours in brandy is not padding: dry glacé fruit added straight to a freezing mixture turns into hard nuggets. Plan the soak the day before and add the fruit with its absorbed liquor, draining off any excess.
- Alcohol and freezingBetween the spirit in the base and the brandy in the fruit, this mixture will set only softly. That is probably why the fruit goes in at the mush stage and why it is served in a cup rather than sliced; expect the texture of a thick frozen slush.
- "Freeze to a mush"In a modern churn, this is the point at which the paddle leaves a trail and the mixture mounds softly, roughly the consistency of soft-serve. Stop, fold in the fruit by hand so it does not jam the dasher, then churn or still-freeze briefly to finish.
- Ingredient substitutionsSultana raisins are golden raisins; citron is the candied peel of Citrus medica, still sold in tubs at holiday baking time and replaceable with candied orange or lemon peel. Glacé cherries and candied pineapple are unchanged, though modern versions are sweeter and wetter — pat them dry before the brandy soak.
- Small beer jugsSmall handled mugs, of the sort sold as Tom and Jerry cups; the recipe gives no capacity. Any small heavy mug or a stemmed glass works; chill it first, since the mixture softens fast.
- Raw egg in the baseA Tom and Jerry is built on beaten eggs, and a frozen version is unlikely to bring them to a safe temperature; check the base recipe before you start. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or a cooked custard base instead.
Tom and Jerry is a hot, frothy egg-and-spirit punch — eggs beaten with sugar, cut with rum or brandy and topped with hot milk — that was a fixture of nineteenth-century American bars and was popularized in print by Jerry Thomas; the name is generally traced to the characters Tom and Jerry from Pierce Egan's Life in London (1821), whose names attached to all manner of raffish things. Freezing the punch and folding brandied candied fruit into it turns a barroom drink into a dessert in the manner of an English iced pudding, and the "University" label appears to follow a naming habit of the period, in which puddings borrowed the prestige of colleges, clubs and hotels rather than any documented connection to them. Its place among the frozen dishes is a reminder that pre-Prohibition American cookery treated spirits as an ordinary flavoring, and that the hand-cranked ice-cream freezer was familiar equipment in a well-run kitchen.