No. 3491

Diplomat Pudding

Pouding a la Diplomate

Prepare a salpicon of candied fruits cut in quarter-inch squares, selecting pineapple, cherries, almonds, apricots, orange peel and Smyrna raisins; pour over some hot twenty-degree syrup flavored with rum, and let all macerate for half an hour. Put in a tinned copper basin, ten egg-yolks and six ounces of sugar; beat well together and dilute with a pint of boiling milk; cook without allowing it to come to a boil, then cool off and add one pint of cream; strain through a sieve, freeze, flavor with maraschino, and mix in half as much very firm and well-drained whipped cream. Cut up some slices of Savoy biscuit (No. 3231). Take a two-quart pudding mold, incrust it in ice, line it with a layer of uncooked Andalusian ice cream (No. 3446), and on the bottom have the sliced biscuit previously soaked in rum; scatter a part of the fruit salpicon over, then place a layer of the ice cream, and continue in this way to fill the mold, finishing the top with the ice cream; set the cover on tight, pack it well in salted ice, and freeze for one hour and a half, then unmold on a napkin and serve with a sauce made of vanilla ice cream (No. 3458) flavored with rum, mixing into it half as much whipped cream (No. 50).

← No. 3490 Constance Pudding Ices & Ice Creams No. 3492 Duchess Pudding →

For the Modern Kitchen

A bombe in all but name: a two-quart mold lined with ice cream and packed with rum-soaked sponge and candied fruit. Nothing here is difficult, but the original assumes a brigade, an ice cave and a salt-and-ice freezing tub.

The hinge: keep the custard below the boilTen yolks to a pint of milk is a rich custard that will scramble the moment it simmers. Cook it over gentle heat, stirring, until it coats the spoon at about 180F, then strain immediately into the cold cream to stop it.
Twenty-degree syrupThat is 20 degrees on the Baume saccharometer, the scale confectioners of the period used for sugar syrups; roughly half a pound of sugar dissolved in a pint of water. Made hot and poured over the diced fruit, it plumps the candied pieces so they do not freeze into gravel.
SalpiconA kitchen term for anything cut into small, even dice, here a quarter inch. The point is uniformity, so no single shard of candied pineapple dominates a spoonful.
Tinned copper basinA round-bottomed copper bowl lined with tin, used over direct heat for custards. A heavy stainless saucepan or a bowl set over barely simmering water does the same job with less anxiety.
Savoy biscuitRanhofer's No. 3231 is a sponge batter of the biscuit de Savoie type, close kin to the ladyfinger. Dry, bought savoiardi soak up rum without collapsing and are the closest thing on a shelf today.
MaraschinoThe cherry liqueur from Dalmatia, distilled from marasca cherries and their crushed kernels, not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Use a true maraschino such as Luxardo, and go lightly: alcohol lowers the freezing point and too much will leave the bombe slack.
Incrusting and packing in iceThe mold was buried in a tub of crushed ice and coarse salt, which reaches well below freezing and sets a two-quart bombe in about ninety minutes. A domestic freezer at 0F is warmer and slower; allow at least six hours, and overnight is safer.
The Andalusian liningNo. 3446 is a separate preparation cross-referenced from elsewhere in the book. The custard made in this entry is itself a serviceable lining, and using one base throughout gives a cleaner result than chasing two.
Yield and serviceA two-quart mold gives ten to twelve portions. Unmold by wrapping the outside briefly in a hot cloth; the folded napkin under it is there to absorb meltwater on the platter, and the rum-scented vanilla sauce should be soft-frozen, not liquid.

A Little History

Puddings of this shape run through 19th-century French confectionery under the names bombe, plombiere and pouding glace, and the diplomate version, sponge soaked in liqueur layered with candied fruit and cream, exists in both a set-custard form and this frozen one. The name is traditionally traced to the diplomatic dinners of the Restoration and July Monarchy, though the story is folk tradition rather than documented fact; it is sometimes said that a dish that could be molded in advance, unmolded whole and cut at the table suited service a la russe, and that the same logic gave the period its charlottes and its aspics, but service a la russe did not become general in France until the middle of the century, so the connection is speculation. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for more than thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of that kitchen, and the ice chapter is one of its most revealing: it presumes a cellar of natural ice, a supply of coarse salt, and enough cooks to spin custards while others cut candied fruit into quarter-inch dice.