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Frozen Pudding
Soak for two or three hours one cup of assorted candied fruit in enough brandy to cover. The brandy will prevent the fruits from freezing.
Make a custard of two eggs, one cup of sugar, pinch of salt, and two and one-half cups of milk; cool, and add one cup of heavy cream, and one-half gill of rum. Freeze.
Fill a mold with alternate layers of cream and brandied fruit. Pack in salt and ice for two hours.
A brandied tutti-frutti ice, layered into a mold and ripened in a salt-and-ice pack. The one thing to get right is the custard: cook it in a double boiler to 170-175F, until it coats a spoon, and no further, or you will have sweet scrambled egg.
- Half a gill of rumA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup, or 4 tablespoons. Add it to the cooled custard, not the hot, so the alcohol does not flash off.
- Alcohol and freezingThe book is right that brandy keeps the fruit soft, and the rum in the base does the same thing to the ice. Keep to the quantities given; much more and the mixture will never set past a slush.
- Candied fruit"Assorted candied fruit" would have meant a mixture of the usual candied peel, cherries, pineapple and citron. Any modern glace fruit mix works; chop it to pea size so it distributes rather than sinking in lumps.
- Freezing without a crank freezerThe original assumes a hand-cranked churn set in salt and ice. A modern ice-cream machine gives the same result. Without either, freeze in a shallow pan and beat hard with a whisk every 30 minutes until thick.
- Packing the moldRock salt and crushed ice, roughly one part salt to three of ice by volume, packed around a tightly covered mold, holds the pudding below freezing and firms the layers together. A domestic freezer set to its coldest will do the job too, though it may need longer than the two hours given; press a sheet of plastic against the surface first.
- UnmoldingDip the sealed mold in warm water for 10 to 15 seconds, then invert onto a chilled plate. Return to the freezer for 20 minutes if it softens while you work.
- YieldNearer a quart and a half, which serves eight. The alcohol should keep it reasonably scoopable straight from the freezer.
Frozen pudding was the American dinner-party version of what French kitchens called a bombe or plombière: a molded ice, usually custard-based, studded with liquored fruit and turned out whole at the table. The candied fruit soaked in spirits is the same trick used in fruitcake, and for the same reason -- sugar and alcohol both depress the freezing point, which is why the fruit stays yielding while the cream around it sets hard. The book's plain statement that "the brandy will prevent the fruits from freezing" is a fair piece of kitchen physics stated without fuss.