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Nesselrode Pudding
One and one-half cups sugar, three cups milk and the yolks of five eggs. Make a custard of these, add a pinch of salt, strain, and, when cool, add one pint of cream, three tablespoons of pineapple syrup, two tablespoons of sherry or Maraschino. Take one cup each of French chestnuts and almonds. Blanch the almonds and chop them fine, then pound to a paste. Shell the chestnuts, blanch, and then boil until tender. Force through a sieve, and add to the custard. Line a two quart melon mold with half the mixture. To the remaining half add a half-dozen large French chestnuts which have boiled until tender and been allowed to soak for an hour in Maraschino; also one-fourth of a cup of Sultana raisins and one-fourth cup of assorted fruits cut in bits. Fill the mold with this mixture, cover and pack in ice and salt for two hours. This is often served in individual paper cases with a bit of candied fruit on top. BISCUIT GLACÉ-Make a syrup of one cup of sugar and onefourth of a cup of water. Beat the yolks of four eggs and mix with three-fourths cup of syrup and one-half cup of cream. Place all in a saucepan over a slow fire and stir constantly until it forms a thick coating in the spoon. Empty into a mixing bowl, set on ice, beat until is it cold and stiff, and then add one pint of cream beaten very stiff. Flavor with a teaspoon of vanilla or any preferred extract. Divide the mixture into small paper boxes, sprinkle with pulverized macaroons, and set in a pail packed in ice and salt for four hours.
Two frozen desserts in one entry: a chestnut bombe packed in a melon mold, and a lighter biscuit glacé built on a cooked egg-yolk mousse. Both were made in an era of ice-and-salt freezing, and both need a little translation for a modern freezer.
- The hinge: freeze before you moldThe instruction to "line a two quart melon mold with half the mixture" only works if the custard has already been frozen to a thick, spreadable, soft-serve state — in period practice, churned in a hand freezer first. Pour liquid custard into a mold and you get a solid brick, not a lined bombe. Freeze the base in an ice-cream machine, then line and fill the chilled mold and give it several hours in the freezer rather than the two hours quoted for ice and salt.
- Ice and saltPacking "in ice and salt" means a bucket of crushed ice with coarse salt worked through it. The brine pulls heat out faster than the still air of a domestic freezer because it is in direct contact with the mold, so a modern freezer will do the same job but wants considerably longer than the two hours quoted; overnight is safest for a two-quart mold.
- Custard temperatureFive yolks to three cups milk is a thin pouring custard. Cook it to 170-175F, stirring, until it coats a spoon — the recipe assumes you know this. The biscuit glacé mixture is the same test, described in full: "a thick coating in the spoon."
- French chestnutsThese are marrons — the large single-kernel European chestnut. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts (a cup measured by volume, plus six whole ones for the Maraschino soak) replace the shelling and blanching entirely. Do not substitute water chestnuts.
- Almond pasteBlanching, chopping and pounding a cup of almonds to a paste is the work of a food processor now, though almonds ground alone go oily; pulse with a spoonful of the sugar. Commercial almond paste is sweeter and will throw the sugar balance off if swapped one for one.
- Pineapple syrupThe sweet liquid from a can or jar of pineapple, not a cordial or snow-cone syrup. Three tablespoons is for flavor and a little softening of the freeze.
- MaraschinoThe original means the dry Italian cherry liqueur (Luxardo and similar), not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Sherry is offered as the plainer alternative.
- Pulverized macaroonsCrisp almond macaroons dried out and crushed to crumbs — amaretti are the closest thing on a shelf today. Sprinkle at the moment of serving if you want them to stay crisp.
- YieldThe pudding fills a two-quart mold and serves twelve to sixteen in slices, or fills about that many of the "individual paper cases." The biscuit glacé makes something over a quart, or eight to ten small paper boxes.
Nesselrode pudding is generally traced to Count Karl von Nesselrode, the long-serving Russian foreign minister of the first half of the nineteenth century, and is traditionally credited to his household chef, though the attribution is not firmly documented; by the later nineteenth century the name was attached to almost any frozen chestnut cream studded with dried and candied fruit and scented with Maraschino. It was one of the standard grand desserts of American hotel and banquet cookery, which is why a practical household book carries it. The biscuit glacé tucked into the same entry shows the other half of the tradition: a cooked yolk-and-syrup base lightened with whipped cream, frozen still in paper boxes without churning, a close relation of the later semifreddo. Both depended on ice, which by 1900 was delivered to many city kitchens cheaply enough for a home cook to pack a mold without much thought of expense.