No. 3493

Fleury Pudding

Pouding a la Fleury

Mix in a vessel one quart of apricot pulp, ten ounces of sugar, one gill of almond milk (No. 4) and half a gill of kirsch; bring it to twenty-two degrees of the saccharometer, then strain through a sieve and freeze; mix in half as much whipped cream. Have a two-quart pudding mold packed in ice; coat the inside with strawberry ice cream (No. 3451), and fill it in layers composed of the above prepared cream; between each layer arrange a macedoine of fresh fruits macerated in kirsch and some biscuits soaked in maraschino; let the last layer be ice cream; pack and freeze for one hour and a half; unmold and serve with a separate sauce made of strawberry ice cream, mixing into it a little kirsch and whipped cream.

← No. 3492 Duchess Pudding Ices & Ice Creams No. 3494 Imperial Rice Pudding →

For the Modern Kitchen

A moulded frozen pudding of the Delmonico's kind: an apricot ice lightened with whipped cream, lined with strawberry ice cream and layered with fruit and soaked sponge. Nothing in it is difficult, but the sugar reading and the mould are where the recipe assumes knowledge a modern cook no longer has.

The saccharometer reading is the hingeTwenty-two degrees is most likely degrees Baume, the scale period kitchens generally used for syrups; read that way the sweetened fruit mixture sits near 40 percent sugar by weight, which a modern refractometer would read as roughly 40 Brix. Too little sugar and the pudding freezes into a brick that will not slice; too much and the centre never sets firm enough to unmould.
A gillHalf a cup, so one gill of almond milk is 4 fl oz and half a gill of kirsch is 2 fl oz. The kirsch is not optional decoration, it depresses the freezing point and keeps the apricot layer scoopable.
Almond milk here is not the carton kindRanhofer's No. 4 is blanched sweet almonds pounded to a paste with water and strained, closer to orgeat than to a modern shelf-stable beverage. Commercial almond milk is far thinner and stabiliser-heavy; grinding 4 oz blanched almonds with the half cup of water and straining through muslin gets you nearer the intent.
BiscuitsLadyfingers or a dry sponge finger, not a cookie in the American sense. They should be dipped in the maraschino, not left to sit, or they collapse into paste between the layers.
MacedoineA mixed dice of fresh fruit, cut small and uniform, macerated in kirsch; the original gives no maceration time. Keep the pieces under a quarter inch or they freeze to gravel and fight the spoon.
Packing the mouldThe original buries a two-quart pudding mould in ice; period practice was to mix that ice with coarse salt, which brings the bath well below 0F and freezes the lining coat fast. A domestic freezer at 0F will do the same job more slowly: chill the mould hard first, spread the strawberry lining while it is stiff but spreadable, and return it to the freezer between layers.
Freezing timeAn hour and a half in a salt-and-ice bath is not an hour and a half in a freezer. Allow at least four to six hours, and overnight is better, before unmoulding by wiping the outside with a hot cloth.
YieldTwo quarts serves ten to twelve. The sauce, strawberry ice cream slackened with kirsch and whipped cream, should be made at the last moment and served barely melted.

A Little History

The recipe comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to the long family of bombes and moulded ice puddings that were the expected close to a formal dinner in the late nineteenth century. Such puddings were built in a lined mould so that a plain slice would reveal a pattern of contrasting ices and fruit, which is the whole point of coating the interior with strawberry before filling it. The names attached to them were largely decorative and honorific, and Ranhofer's list runs through dozens of them in a few pages; the same book carries a Duchess pudding immediately before this one and an Imperial rice pudding immediately after. The reliance on a saccharometer is worth noting on its own: professional kitchens of the period measured sugar syrups by density as a matter of routine.