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Alexandria Iced Pudding
Place two breakfast cupfuls of milk or cream in a saucepan with the yolks of four eggs and sugar to the taste, and stir them into a custard; next turn this custard into a basin, and when it becomes cold, mix in four ounces of ratafia cakes, broken in pieces, and rubbed through a sieve, and flavor with two or three drops of extract of bitter almonds; pack the basin in ice, and freeze until the mixture has been reduced to the freezing-point. Place a layer of this iced mixture at the bottom of a mould, and on top of this arrange a few strawberries preserved whole, and from which the syrup has been thoroughly drained, having dipped them, one at a time, into lemonjuice. Continue to put in layers, as above, until all the ingredients are used, then return the mould to the ice, and let it remain there for a couple of hours, turn the pudding out onto a dish, and serve.
The structure here is a nineteenth-century bombe: a stirred egg custard frozen in a packed mould, layered with drained preserved strawberries. The flavouring is the problem, and it is not a small one.
- Extract of bitter almondsIn this period the product sold under such names could be a distillate of bitter almond or peach kernels carrying free hydrocyanic acid (prussic acid) alongside the benzaldehyde that gives the flavour, though rectified preparations largely free of it were also on sale. Because the strength and composition of the historical product cannot be reconstructed from the page, dosing it by "two or three drops" from an unstandardised bottle into an unheated frozen dessert is not something to reproduce; use a current frozen-custard recipe instead.
- The custard is barely cookedYolks stirred to a custard over direct heat, then chilled and frozen, may never pass through a temperature that pasteurises them. Freezing preserves whatever was in the mixture rather than destroying it.
- Ratafia cakesSmall crisp almond macaroons, themselves traditionally made with a proportion of bitter almonds, which is why they pair with the extract here. Four ounces crushed and sieved was meant to thicken and perfume the custard as much as to sweeten it.
- A breakfast cupfulRoughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces in period usage, larger than a teacup and not a standardised measure. Two of them, with four yolks, gives a fairly lean custard by modern ice-cream standards.
- Freezing in a basin and mouldThere is no churn in this method. The mixture is frozen in a basin packed in ice (the recipe does not mention salt, though ice alone will not reach the "freezing-point" it asks for), then layered into a mould and returned to the ice for two hours to firm and take the shape. Without agitation the result is dense and slightly icy rather than smooth.
- The lemon juice dipThe preserved strawberries are drained of syrup and dipped one at a time in lemon juice. The recipe gives no reason; the likely effects are to offset the syrup's sweetness and to help the fruit hold its colour against the pale custard.
Iced puddings were a showpiece of the late Victorian dessert course, and a moulded ice suited banquet service, where it could be unpacked, turned out and sent to the table looking architectural. Names like "Alexandria" followed the fashion of the day for attaching a place or a personage to a mould — such titles are generally decorative rather than documentary, and rarely indicate any real connection to the city. The reliance on ratafia biscuits and bitter almond flavouring suggests French pâtisserie practice as it reached English-language cookery books of the nineteenth century; the almond note was long considered the mark of a refined ice.