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Iced Pudding
Prepare a custard with one pint of cream, the yolks of twelve eggs, and twelve ounces of crushed loaf sugar. Mix in one wineglassful of maraschino cordial, freeze until quite stiff, add one and one-half ounce each of preserved dried cherries, pears, pine-apples and citron, all cut into very small pieces, and one tablespoonful of vanilla extract; stir well and freeze again; have ready a melon-shaped mould packed in ice and salt, fill it with the mixture, cover it over, pack more ice on top, and let it remain for two hours. Turn the pudding out onto a dish, cover it with a mixture of the whites of half a dozen eggs whipped to a stiff froth, and lightly mixed in with six ounces of finely-powdered loaf sugar, sprinkle over a few pistachios chopped fine, and serve at once.
This is a bombe glacée under an older name: a rich frozen custard studded with candied fruit, moulded in a salt-and-ice bath and masked with meringue at the table. Two things decide whether it works — a properly cooked custard base and a mould that is packed hard enough to set the pudding through.
- Cook the custard, then chill it hardThe original assumes you know how: twelve yolks with the sugar and hot cream, stirred over low heat until it coats the spoon at about 175-180F, then strained and refrigerated overnight. Freezing a warm base gives coarse ice crystals no amount of churning will fix.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in hard cones or blocks, crushed as needed; granulated is the direct substitute. Twelve ounces is about 1 3/4 cups for the custard, and the six ounces for the meringue means superfine or confectioners' sugar, which is what "finely-powdered" indicates.
- A wineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period, roughly 2 fluid ounces. Maraschino here is the clear Dalmatian cherry liqueur, not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries — the two are unrelated in flavour and sweetness.
- Alcohol and freezingTwo ounces of liqueur plus a tablespoon of extract will soften the set noticeably. That is intentional in a bombe, which should slice rather than shatter, but do not add more, or the centre will never firm up.
- Freezing without a machine"Freeze until quite stiff" meant a hand-cranked pail churn. An ice cream maker does the job; failing that, freeze in a shallow pan and beat thoroughly three or four times at 30-minute intervals before folding in the fruit.
- The mouldA melon or bombe mould packed in crushed ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one of salt by volume, will hold well below freezing for the two hours specified. A modern freezer at 0F does the same thing with less mess; give it four hours or more for a mould of this size. Dip briefly in warm water to turn out.
- The candied fruitAn ounce and a half each is a scant 1/4 cup, about 6 oz of fruit in total. Chop it very small and chill it before folding in, or warm pieces will melt channels in the frozen base.
- The raw meringueThe whites are whipped with sugar and never cooked or browned. If you make this, use pasteurized whites; the pudding is served immediately and cannot be held.
- YieldPerhaps a quart and a half of frozen mixture once churned — eight to ten servings from a mould of this size.
Oscar Tschirky's book belongs to the era when a formal American dinner ended with an entremets glacced pudding was among the grandest forms of it: a frozen custard packed into a melon, pineapple or turban mould, unmoulded whole at the table and finished with meringue and chopped pistachio for colour. The technique is French, associated in the Carme-to-Escoffier line with the bombe. The maraschino is a period marker in itself — the clear cherry liqueur long associated with Zara on the Dalmatian coast was a fashionable flavouring around 1900, used in everything from fruit compotes to punches.