No. 3498

Serano Pudding

Pouding a la Serano

Boil one quart of raspberry pulp, one pound of syrup at thirty-two degrees, one gill of lemon juice and vanilla, bringing the whole to a twenty-two degree heat, then strain through a sieve and freeze, incorporating into the ice one Italian meringue egg-white (No. 140). Have a pudding mold well packed in salted ice; coat the inside with pistachio ice cream (No. 3454). Fill up the mold in alternate layers, having a light strawberry ice cream (No. 3451) on the bottom, then some biscuits intercalated with fruits, and over the prepared raspberry ice; continue to fill in the same order: raspberry ice, biscuits and fruits cut in small squares. Have the mold well filled, fasten the cover on tight, pack in ice and freeze for one hour for each quart; invert it on a napkin and serve with a sauce-boat of strawberry sauce mingled with maraschino and whipped cream.

← No. 3497 Romanoff Pudding Ices & Ice Creams No. 3499 Sicilian Pudding →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a moulded frozen bombe in the Delmonico manner: a shell of pistachio ice cream, filled in bands with raspberry water ice, sponge and fruit, then frozen solid in a salt-and-ice bath. Almost all the difficulty lies in the sugar densities and the moulding, not the flavours.

Degrees mean Baumé, not FahrenheitDegrees mean Baume, not Fahrenheit -- "Syrup at thirty-two degrees" is a saccharometer reading on the Baume scale, a heavy syrup of roughly 60 per cent sugar by weight. Bringing the finished mixture "to a twenty-two degree heat" means diluting it back down to about 22 Baume, a usual working density for a fruit water ice; much below that it freezes hard and grainy, much above it will not set firm.
A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. The vanilla quantity is left entirely to the cook: a teaspoon of extract or half a split bean infused in the hot syrup is in keeping.
Italian meringueRanhofer's No. 140 is white of egg beaten stiff with boiling sugar syrup poured in. The hot syrup partly cooks the white, so this is not simply a raw meringue, though it should not be assumed fully pasteurised. One egg white's worth of meringue folded into a quart-plus of ice keeps the texture light and slows melting.
"Biscuits"Not cookies in the American sense but dry sponge fingers -- ladyfingers or savoiardi. They should be brushed with a little syrup or maraschino so they do not freeze to shards, and "intercalated with fruits" means laid in a layer with small dice of candied or fresh fruit between.
Freezing without a salt bathThe mould was packed in crushed ice and rock salt, a mixture that can fall to around -6F and freezes a filled mould through in about an hour per quart, as the recipe says. A modern freezer at 0F will do the same job but needs four to six hours, or overnight for a large mould; there is no need to shorten the time, only to allow more of it.
Sealing the mould"Fasten the cover on tight" matters because brine must not reach the ice cream. A layer of plastic film under the lid, or a band of butter around the seam as the period cooks did, prevents a salty rim.
Lining the mouldChill the mould hard first, then press softened pistachio ice cream up the sides with the back of a spoon in a layer about half an inch thick and refreeze before filling. If the shell is applied to a warm mould it slumps to the bottom and the pudding turns out patchy.
UnmouldingDip the sealed mould in warm water for a few seconds, invert onto a chilled dish -- the napkin in the original absorbs the meltwater -- and return it to the freezer while you finish the sauce.
YieldThe raspberry ice alone is roughly a quart and a half; a filled quart-and-a-half to two-quart mould serves eight to ten as the frozen course at the end of a long dinner.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its ice chapter is among the more elaborate stretches of the book: dozens of numbered puddings glaces and bombes, each a lined mould with a different filling, each named for a person, a city or a patron. The names are mostly ornamental and often untraceable -- "Serano" has no established origin. What the recipe really documents is the cross-referenced system behind a nineteenth-century restaurant kitchen: the syrup, the Italian meringue, the pistachio and strawberry ice creams all carry their own numbers, so a chef assembling this dessert was drawing on components already standing in the larder. It also documents the ice trade. A pudding frozen an hour to the quart in salt and ice, then held until service, depended on a reliable daily supply of ice, which is why frozen moulds signalled luxury on an American menu well into the 1890s.