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Chocolate Ice Pudding
Place six egg yolks in a copper basin with four ounces granulated sugar and a teaspoon vanilla essence. Place the basin on a corner of the range and briskly whisk up for ten minutes; remove to a table, add four ounces grated chocolate, then set the basin on ice and constantly mix with a wooden spoon until thoroughly cold. Mix in two gills whipped cream, fill up with the preparation a quart pudding mould and tightly cover; bury the mould in a pail with broken ice and rock salt for two hours. Remove, wipe it all around, unmould upon a cold dish with napkin and serve.
This is a still-frozen bombe built on a pâte à bombe — cooked yolk foam rather than a churned custard. The whole thing hangs on how far you take the yolks over the heat.
- Cook the yolk foam properlyTen minutes of brisk whisking over gentle heat should bring the yolks to 160F/71C, thick and ribboning off the whisk. Use a bowl over barely simmering water rather than the corner of a range, and check with a thermometer: undercooked and it is raw egg, overcooked and it scrambles.
- Gills and ouncesTwo gills is one cup of cream, measured before whipping. Four ounces of sugar is about 115g (a generous half cup); four ounces of grated chocolate is also 115g.
- The chocolate"Grated chocolate" here means a plain eating or cooking chocolate, not cocoa powder and not modern chips. Fold it into the yolk foam while it is still hot so it melts smoothly, then chill over ice as directed.
- Copper basinAn unlined copper zabaglione bowl heats fast and evenly. Any wide stainless or glass bowl set over water does the same job; avoid aluminium, which dulls the colour of egg foams.
- Fold, do not stirThe whipped cream and the whisked yolk foam are the only aeration this pudding gets — there is no churning. Have the base thoroughly cold before folding, and fold in thirds with a spatula so the foam survives.
- Freezing in ice and saltBroken ice with rock salt in roughly a 3:1 ratio by volume drops the bath well below freezing, which is what sets a mould in two hours. A modern freezer at 0F works too, but allow four to six hours and expect a firmer, denser set.
- UnmouldingWipe the mould clean of brine before opening it, or salt water will run onto the dessert. A five-second dip in warm water and a cloth on the outside will release it; the napkin on the cold dish was the usual service for a moulded ice, and also keeps it from sliding.
- YieldA quart mould serves six to eight. Serve straight from the freezer — with no stabilisers or invert sugar, it softens quickly.
Filippini's "ice pudding" is the English name for what a French kitchen of the same date called a bombe or glace moulée: an ice cream frozen in a shape rather than served in scoops. The base is a pâte à bombe, egg yolks and sugar whisked over heat into a warm foam, a technique often linked to zabaglione and still standard in pastry work because the cooked foam freezes soft without churning. Before mechanical refrigeration, moulded ices depended entirely on the ice-and-salt bath described here, and the pail of broken ice and rock salt was presumably familiar enough in the better-off American kitchens this book addresses. Chocolate versions appear throughout turn-of-the-century menus, where the mould's shape — and the ceremony of turning it out onto a napkin at table — was as much the point as the flavour.