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Nesselrode Pudding
Peel the outer skins of about forty chestnuts and boil them in water for about thirty minutes; take them out, remove the inner skin and then pound them to a paste, adding one pinch of salt during the pounding. Pass this paste through a sieve, moistening it with a little cream. Have in readiness one pint of boiled custard and add it to the chestnut-paste. Place the whole in the freezer, and when it is firm, beat one breakfast cupful of cream to a froth and work it in; freeze again and add two ounces each of raisins, citron-peel and stewed or candied pineapple, one teaspoonful of vanilla extract and one teacupful of maraschino. Work them well and freeze again, then place the pudding in a dome-shaped mould, set it on the ice, and when wanted, turn it out and decorate with angelica points and half cherries, garnishing round the dish with crystallized apricots or greengages.
A frozen chestnut custard from the Waldorf's kitchen, made in a hand-crank ice-cream freezer and moulded in a bombe. It works in a modern kitchen, but the measures and the equipment need translating.
- The hinge: chestnut purée must be smoothAny grit or fibre left in the purée will read as sandiness once frozen. Sieve it as directed, or use a food processor and then a fine sieve; unsweetened canned or vacuum-packed chestnut purée is a fair substitute for the forty peeled nuts.
- Chestnut quantityForty chestnuts in the shell is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, yielding perhaps a pound of peeled nuts, or something like 1 1/2 to 2 cups of pur ebs the inner skin comes away much less easily once the nuts cool.
- "Boiled custard"This is a stirred crème anglaise, not a baked one: yolks, sugar and milk or cream cooked to 170-175F until it coats a spoon. The original assumes you know it and gives no sugar quantity, so sweeten as for any custard base, about 5-6 oz sugar to the pint.
- Cup measuresA breakfast cupful is a generous cup, variously reckoned at anything from 8 to 10 fl oz of cream; a teacupful is smaller, usually put at 5 to 7 fl oz. The maraschino at that volume is a lot of alcohol for a pint of custard.
- Alcohol and freezingMaraschino depresses the freezing point badly, which is why the recipe freezes in stages and adds the liqueur late. Cut it to 2-3 tablespoons if you want the pudding to set firm enough to unmould cleanly; the full teacupful will stay slushy in a domestic freezer.
- "Place in the freezer"The freezer here is the churn, not a cabinet. Use an ice-cream machine for the first two stages, then pack the mixture into the mould, cover, and harden in a modern freezer for at least 4 hours; the original's "set it on the ice" means bury the sealed mould in ice and salt.
- Fruit and garnishChop the raisins, citron and pineapple small and fold them in at the end so they do not tear the churn. Angelica points are candied angelica stem, still sold by cake-decorating suppliers; crystallized greengages can be replaced with any candied apricot or plum.
- Unmoulding and yieldDip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled dish. Expect about 1 1/2 quarts, serving 8 to 10 in the small portions the period intended.
Nesselrode pudding is generally traced to the kitchen of Count Karl von Nesselrode, the Russian foreign minister under Alexander I and Nicholas I, and is usually credited to his chef, remembered as Mouy or Monny; the attribution is traditional rather than documented, but the dish carried the diplomat's name across nineteenth-century menus in Paris, London and New York. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the Waldorf's dining rooms it had become the standard grand frozen sweet of the American hotel repertoire, and its appearance here, with maraschino, citron and crystallized greengages, shows how much a first-class kitchen depended on imported candied fruit and a steady supply of ice. Chestnuts gave it the character that distinguished it from an ordinary bombe glacée, and "Nesselrode" later drifted loose from the chestnut entirely, ending up as a name for rum-and-candied-fruit pies and ice creams that Nesselrode's chef would not have recognized.