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Iced Nut Pudding
Blanch about four dozen fresh nuts of any kind, pound half of them with a few blanched sweet almonds and put the paste into a saucepan with one and one-half pints of hot vanilla cream. Stir well over the fire until the mixture is thick, then let it cool and pass it through a fine sieve into a basin; pour a little of it at the bottom of a dome-shaped mould packed in salted ice, sprinkle over a few of the remaining nuts cut in halves and repeat till the mould is full. Lay a round of paper on the top, then the lid of the mould, cementing it round with paste of flour, cover the mould with ice and let it remain for one hour.
This is a still-frozen bombe: a nut custard set in a mould buried in ice and salt, with no churning at all. The whole thing hinges on the custard being thick and smooth before it goes into the mould, because nothing after that point will improve the texture.
- "Vanilla cream" means custard"Vanilla cream" most likely means a stirred vanilla custard, though Oscar does not spell out the ingredients. A workable modern reading: about 3 cups of cream and milk, 6 to 8 egg yolks, about 3/4 cup sugar, a split vanilla bean. Cook it to 170-180F, thick enough to coat a spoon, and no further; the nut paste thickens it as well, so it can seize if pushed.
- One and one-half pintsThree US cups. With the nut paste and the halved nuts layered through, this comes to roughly a quart — enough to fill a 1-quart mould, serving about six.
- Four dozen nutsVague by design — the recipe invites any nut. Forty-eight kernels can mean anything from about 2 oz of hazelnuts to 8 oz of walnuts; half go into the paste with a small handful of blanched almonds, half are halved and layered in. Weigh rather than count.
- Blanching and poundingHazelnuts and almonds blanch in boiling water or, for hazelnuts, by toasting and rubbing off the skins in a towel. A food processor replaces the mortar, but run it in short pulses with a spoonful of the sugar or you will end up with nut butter and oil separation.
- Sweet almondsSpecified to distinguish them from bitter almonds, which were sold for flavouring in 1896 and contain cyanogenic compounds. Ordinary supermarket almonds are the sweet kind; a drop of almond extract does the same job.
- Salted ice and the flour sealCrushed ice with about a third its weight in coarse salt drops well below freezing. The flour-and-water paste luted round the lid keeps the brine out — salt water leaking into a bombe ruins it. A modern freezer does the same work: seal the mould in plastic wrap and foil instead.
- One hour is not enoughOne hour, and modern timings -- An hour works in a well-packed ice-and-salt bath. In a home freezer at 0F allow four to six hours, or overnight for a full-sized mould.
- Texture, and how to fix itUnchurned custard freezes dense and slightly icy — that is what an iced pudding was. Folding a cup of softly whipped cream into the cooled, sieved custard lightens it considerably without departing from period practice.
- UnmouldingDip the mould in warm water for a few seconds, turn out onto a chilled plate, and let it stand 10 to 15 minutes in the refrigerator before serving. Straight from a modern freezer it is too hard to taste of anything.
Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, at the tail end of the era when a hotel kitchen made all its frozen work with ice hauled in from lakes and rivers and packed with rock salt in wooden tubs — mechanical refrigeration existed but was not yet standard in restaurant basements. Iced puddings and bombes were the formal end of that craft: unchurned custards set in lidded pewter or tinned copper moulds, sealed with a rope of flour paste so the brine could not seep past the lid, and turned out at table as domes, pyramids or spires. The layering here, custard alternating with halved nuts, is the standard bombe construction in miniature, and the instruction to use "fresh nuts of any kind" reflects a seasonal kitchen rather than an indifferent one: walnuts, hazelnuts and chestnuts came in through autumn.