No. 3496

Plum Pudding

Plum Pouding

Melt half a pound of chocolate in a quart of water, add three-quarters of a pound of sugar, a little vanilla, and one quart of cold syrup at thirty degrees; strain through a sieve and freeze; now add two Italian meringue egg-whites (No. 140), some seeded Malaga and Smyrna raisins, currants, orange, lemon and citron peel cut in three-sixteenth of an inch squares, all of these previously boiled in a little twenty-two degree syrup, then drained and macerated for one hour in kirsch; drain and mix them well into the ice. Coat a two-quart pudding mold with chocolate ice cream (No. 3449); fill it with the preparation, freeze as usual and unmold an hour and a half later, on a dish without a napkin. Make the sauce of vanilla (No. 3458), whipped cream (No. 50) and rum; pour a third of the sauce on the pudding and serve the other two-thirds apart.

← No. 3495 Nesselrode Pudding with Candied Chestnuts Ices & Ice Creams No. 3497 Romanoff Pudding →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's frozen plum pudding is a bombe: a two-quart mold lined with chocolate ice cream and filled with a chocolate ice studded with kirsch-soaked fruit. Most of what needs translating is his syrup notation and the ice-and-salt equipment the book assumes.

Syrup at thirty degreesDegrees on the Baume saccharometer, not temperature. Thirty degrees is a heavy syrup of roughly 55-56 percent sugar; twenty-two degrees is a lighter syrup near 40 percent. A hydrometer or refractometer gets you there exactly; without one, weigh the sugar and water to those proportions and accept a small margin.
Sugar is the hingeWith a quart of water, a quart of heavy syrup and three-quarters of a pound of loose sugar, this mixture is deliberately sweet, and sugar is what keeps it scoopable rather than solid. Do not reduce it to taste, or the pudding freezes into a block that will not unmold cleanly.
Italian meringueNo. 140 is whites beaten stiff while boiling syrup is poured in, then whipped cold. Two whites' worth is a small amount folded in for lightness; the hot syrup sets the foam so it survives churning.
The raisinsMalagas are large muscat raisins, which is why the recipe specifies seeding them; Smyrnas are sultanas. Currants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh fruit. Boiling the fruit and peel briefly in light syrup plumps it so it does not freeze to gravel in the ice.
Freezing and molding'Freeze as usual' means packing in ice and rock salt. Churn the ice in a modern machine instead, line the chilled mold with softened chocolate ice cream in an even layer, fill, cover with paper and a lid, and harden in the freezer. His hour and a half is the time in the packed ice; in a home freezer at 0F allow several hours or overnight.
UnmoldingDip the sealed mold in warm water for a few seconds and turn it out. 'On a dish without a napkin' is a service instruction: the folded napkin the book specifies under other dishes is omitted here, presumably because a molded ice would only wet it.
The sauceVanilla (No. 3458) lightened with whipped cream and flavored with rum; the cross-reference sits in the ices section, so whether it is a custard sauce or a vanilla ice base cannot be told from this page. Keep it thin enough to pour and cold, and add the rum off the heat.
YieldA two-quart bombe will serve about ten to twelve, with a third of the sauce poured over and the rest passed at table.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of the restaurant's kitchen, and its ices section is one of the fullest in English. Frozen plum pudding was a nineteenth-century conceit: the boiled Christmas pudding of English tradition, with its raisins, currants and candied peel, reworked as an iced bombe for a warm dining room and a long menu. The cross-references to numbered syrups, meringues and sauces show how the book was meant to be used, as a working system rather than standalone recipes, and the Baume readings reflect a professional kitchen that measured sugar density with an instrument as a matter of course. The named raisins are a period marker too, when Malaga and Smyrna denoted specific imports rather than the generic dried fruit of a supermarket shelf.