No. 3099

Pudding a la de Freese

Pouding a la de Freese

Chop up and pass through a sieve five ounces of beef marrow; place it in a vessel and beat it up to a cream with five ounces of sugar, adding singly eight egg-yolks and three whole eggs, and have the preparation very light. Then incorporate one pound of white meat taken from a chicken, pounded with two and a half gills of cream, six ounces of well-reduced apple marmalade, twelve ounces of Smyrna raisins thoroughly washed in hot water, and finally six stiffly whipped egg whites. Pour this preparation into a dome-shaped cylindrical pudding mold, well buttered and sugared. Stand the mold in a saucepan with hot water to reach to half its height and bring to a boil, then put it into a slack oven. Take out the pudding at the end of forty-five minutes and let stand five or six minutes; then unmold it on a dish and cover with a sabayon sauce (No. 3096), well flavored with Madeira, and serve more of this sauce in a sauce-boat.

← No. 3098 Franklyn Pudding Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3100 Humboldt Pudding →

For the Modern Kitchen

A steamed-then-baked marrow pudding from Ranhofer's Delmonico's repertoire, rich in a way that has largely gone out of fashion. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the measures and materials need translating.

The hinge: keep it a bain-marieThe mold goes into water reaching halfway up its side, is brought to a boil on the stove, then finished in the oven. The point is gentle, even heat: this is an egg custard bound with pounded meat, and direct oven heat on the sides will curdle and weep it before the center sets.
A slack ovenSlack is the coolest working range of a coal range, usually reckoned somewhere around 275-300F. The recipe gives no mold size; forty-five minutes at that heat suits a mold on the order of two to three quarts. Test the center at 170-175F rather than trusting the clock.
GillsA gill is half a cup, so two and a half gills of cream is 1 1/4 cups.
Beef marrowFive ounces is the marrow from a few pounds of center-cut beef marrow bones, though yields vary; a butcher will usually push it out or split the bones. Warm it slightly to soften, then sieve it. It must be at cool room temperature to cream properly with the sugar, not melted.
Pounded chickenA pound of chicken breast (the recipe does not say whether raw or cooked), worked in a mortar with the cream until perfectly smooth. A food processor does this in a minute or two, but keep everything cold and pulse rather than run it, or the mixture heats and breaks.
Apple marmaladeNot the citrus preserve. This is apple cooked down to a stiff, dry paste, closer to German Apfelkraut or a thick apple butter, and the reduction matters because loose purée will slacken the custard.
Smyrna raisinsSultana-type raisins from around Smyrna (Izmir) in western Turkey, widely used in this period. The hot-water wash removes dust and any oily dip left from drying, and plumps them; drain and dry them well before folding in.
The moldA dome-shaped cylindrical mold means a charlotte or plain pudding basin; the recipe gives no capacity, but the mixture will need a large one. Butter it, dust with sugar rather than flour, and expect to run a knife round the rim before unmolding.
Sabayon and yieldNo. 3096 is a whisked egg-yolk-and-wine foam, made over hot water with Madeira; it must not be allowed to approach a simmer or it scrambles. On the quantities given the pudding will serve eight or more as a rich hot entremet.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and a great many of its dishes carry the names of the restaurant's patrons and public figures of the day; the de Freese behind this pudding goes unidentified, and the surrounding numbers, Franklyn and Humboldt, suggest the same habit of naming. The dish itself belongs to a much older line: marrow puddings, sweetened and studded with raisins, run back through English and French cookery for centuries, marrow having been prized as a rich fat that carries sugar and spice without the greasiness of butter. What marks this one as high nineteenth-century restaurant work is the pound of pounded chicken breast, a farce technique borrowed from quenelles and used here purely for texture, giving the pudding body and a pale, close crumb. Sweet-savory constructions of this kind were on their way out even as Ranhofer wrote, which is part of why the book reads today as a closing inventory rather than a working manual.