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Cold Marshmallow Pudding
Chop one-fourth cup candied cherries and soak for one hour in enough rum or sherry to cover. Mix with one-half cup of nut meats and one heaping cup of marshmallows which have been cut in bits. Whip one and one-fourth cups cream and sweeten with two and one-half tablespoons of sugar. Cut in the fruit, nuts and marshmallows. Place in a mold and pack in salt and ice for one hour. Serve in parfait glasses or in glass sherbet cups. This mixture is not intended to be frozen hard, but, when packed, the consistency of the cream is much better than when merely placed on the ice and chilled.
CHARLOTTE GLACÉ-Make the recipe for Velvet Cream See chapter on Cold Desserts, fill a cylindrical mold (a half-pound baking powder box is just the thing) and pack in salt and ice for two hours. Turn out on a platter, surround with lady-fingers, cover the top with whipped cream, and serve. This is practically a partially frozen charlotte russe.
A semifreddo in all but name: whipped cream lightened with marshmallow and set only until barely firm. The whole point is the texture, so the packing time matters more than anything else.
- Salt and ice, translatedPacking a mold in a bucket of crushed ice and coarse salt (roughly three parts ice to one part rock salt by volume) brings the surroundings to about 10-15F and chills from all sides. A freezer at 0F does the same job in a loaf pan or a 1-quart mold; check at 45 minutes and pull it while a spoon still slides in easily.
- Do not let it freeze solidThe recipe says so outright and it is the hinge of the dish. With only 2 1/2 tablespoons of sugar and no eggs, there is almost nothing to keep it soft, so it goes from spoonable to icy brick quickly. If it overshoots, let it stand 15 minutes at room temperature before serving.
- Marshmallows have changedMarshmallows of this period were generally larger and denser than today's, and softened and stretched into the cream. Modern miniature marshmallows are lighter and stay as distinct pale lumps. A heaping cup of large ones, snipped into quarters with wet scissors, is closer to the original.
- Candied cherriesThese are glacé cherries, not maraschino. Drain and blot them well if you substitute maraschino, or the syrup will streak the cream pink and thin it.
- Whipping the creamTake it to soft peaks only, then fold in the fruit; stiffly whipped cream broken by folding in nuts and marshmallow will weep in the mold. Sweeten as it thickens rather than at the start.
- YieldRoughly a quart of finished mixture, enough for six to eight parfait glasses or sherbet cups.
- The Charlotte Glacé noteThe Charlotte Glace note -- Velvet Cream is a separate recipe in the Cold Desserts chapter, so this second paragraph cannot be made from the text above alone. The half-pound baking powder tin it calls for held somewhere between a cup and a pint; a 15-oz can or a small cylindrical mold stands in.
- AlcoholThe rum or sherry is never cooked off. A quarter cup of cherries soaked for an hour absorbs little, but it is worth knowing if serving to children.
Marshmallow appears constantly in American cookery of the 1900s and 1910s, and this recipe catches the moment when it stopped being a confectioner's specialty and became a household ingredient. Commercial marshmallows, made with gelatin rather than the mucilage of the marsh mallow root that gave the sweet its name, were cheap and shelf-stable by the time the Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, and cooks folded them into whipped cream, salads and puddings as a source of body and sweetness at once. The technique here is older than the ingredient: packing a mold in salt and ice to set a cream without churning it is the eighteenth-century method behind every bombe and biscuit glacé, and the closing note about "a partially frozen charlotte russe" shows the author reaching for the grand French repertoire while offering a baking powder tin as the mold.