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Frozen Fig Pudding
Put into a saucepan four tablespoonfuls of sugar without any water over a moderate fire, and melt it until it becomes like molasses; add one teacupful of water, and boil up until the sugar is all dissolved. Put into a basin one quart of milk and fourteen ounces of sugar and the yolks of eight eggs; strain the caramel or boiled sugar into it, and put all into a freezer. Chop up fine one pound of dried figs to about the size of sultana raisins, and add them also, when they are well mixed in, add the pudding frozen a little, put it into a mould, and pack the mould in pounded ice and salt for two hours or so, or until stiff and set. Turn it out onto a cold dish, and serve. A teacupful of curacoa instead of the water may be added to the melted sugar, if preferred.
This is an uncooked custard: eight egg yolks are stirred into cold milk, mixed with hot caramel syrup, and then frozen. Nothing in the method brings the eggs to a safe temperature, which is why the recipe cannot be followed as printed.
- The eggs are never cookedA quart of cold milk plus a teacupful of caramel syrup cannot raise eight yolks anywhere near a pasteurising temperature; the mixture is barely warm, and freezing preserves whatever is in it rather than killing it. Salmonella in raw shell eggs is the specific risk, and a frozen dessert held for hours and served cold gives it every opportunity. Use a current recipe for a cooked custard ice cream instead.
- "Put all into a freezer"The freezer here is not an appliance but a hand-cranked ice-cream churn: a metal canister set in a wooden tub packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, with a dasher turned by hand. The later mould, also packed in ice and salt, is the setting stage that gives the pudding its shape.
- TeacupfulAn approximate measure, not a precise one. Nineteenth-century sources reckon a teacupful variously, commonly somewhere between four and six fluid ounces, and in any case smaller than the standard cup.
- Fourteen ounces of sugarThis is a weight, not a volume, and it is roughly two cups of granulated sugar on top of the four tablespoonfuls burnt for the caramel. Sugar at that level is doing structural work in a hand-churned dessert, keeping the mix soft enough to turn.
- Dry caramelSugar melted with no water at all will scorch quickly and unevenly, and adding cold water to it afterwards throws violent steam. This part of the technique is sound but unforgiving, and it is the only element of the recipe worth borrowing.
- CuraçaoThe optional teacupful of orange liqueur replaces the water in the caramel, so the alcohol is added to molten sugar rather than to the cold custard. Substituting that much liquid also lowers the freezing point and softens the finished pudding.
Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, appeared at the height of the fashion for moulded frozen puddings — mixtures churned to a soft state, packed into a shape, and buried in ice and salt until firm enough to turn out whole. The technique descends from the French bombe glacée and biscuit glacé, and its appeal in a hotel dining room was practical: a pudding set in a mould hours ahead could be unmoulded and sent out to a large table at once. Dried figs, cheap and shipped in quantity from Smyrna and later California, are chopped small; the comparison to sultana raisins tells the cook exactly how fine. Mechanical refrigeration existed in 1896, but the recipe measures success in packing time rather than temperature, in the manner of work done with cut natural ice and rock salt.