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Iced Pudding, Fleury
Prepare a quart of vanilla ice cream. Finely chop six candied cherries, one candied orange peel, two candied apricots and two ounces angelica, place in a bowl with a tablespoon kirsch and mix well. Peel and remove stones from four sound, fresh peaches. Rub them through a wire sieve into the fruits. Beat in a basin to a froth half pint cream, adding two ounces sugar, half teaspoon vanilla essence, and mix well. Keep quarter the quantity of cream in a bowl. Add the fruits, peaches and three-quarters of the vanilla ice cream to the basin with the whipped cream. Mix well with a skimmer, then place in a clean, dome-shaped quart mould. Tightly cover it and bury in the ice-cream tub with broken salted ice for one and a half house. Unmould on a cold dish. Thoroughly mix a quarter of the vanilla with balance of whipped cream until liquid. Pour it over the pudding and serve.
A bombe in all but name: softened vanilla ice cream folded with whipped cream, macerated candied fruit and fresh peach purée, moulded, hardened, then sauced with the reserved cream. Most of the work is in temperature control.
- Work fast and coldThe hinge is keeping everything barely soft. Let the ice cream sit at room temperature only until it will fold — five to ten minutes — and chill the bowl, mould and skimmer beforehand. Ice cream melted to soup will refreeze coarse and icy.
- "One and a half house"A typographical error for one and a half hours. In a modern freezer at 0F/-18C a quart mould needs at least four hours, and overnight is better.
- The ice-cream tubBurying the covered mould in broken ice mixed with rock salt was the standard way for a household cook to hold a hardening temperature before mechanical refrigeration reached the home. A domed pudding basin or metal bombe mould, sealed with a double layer of plastic wrap and foil, goes straight into the freezer instead.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, bright green and faintly musky, was a standard confectioner's garnish and is now sold mainly by baking suppliers. Two ounces is about a third of a cup chopped. Candied citron or extra candied peel is the usual substitute, though the flavour is not the same.
- Candied orange peel"One candied orange peel" most likely means the candied peel of one orange, not a single strip.
- The peachesRubbing four peeled peaches through a sieve gives a good deal more than a cup of purée — likely a cup and a half or more — which is a lot of water going into a frozen mixture. Use ripe fruit, drain off any thin juice that separates, and expect a firmer, more granular set than plain ice cream. Blanching the peaches for thirty seconds makes them peel cleanly.
- KirschClear cherry brandy, not a sweet liqueur. A tablespoon both flavours the fruit and keeps it from freezing into hard nuggets; do not increase it much, as more alcohol will stop the pudding setting.
- UnmouldingDip the mould in warm water for five to ten seconds, wipe it, run a thin knife round the rim and invert onto a chilled plate. Return it to the freezer if it starts to slump before the sauce goes on.
- The sauceBeating the reserved quarter of the ice cream into the reserved whipped cream "until liquid" gives a loose vanilla cream, closer to a pouring custard than a topping. Make it at the last moment and pour at the table.
- YieldA quart mould serves six to eight in slices, cut with a knife dipped in hot water.
Iced puddings of this kind — a shell or a mass of ice cream bound with whipped cream and steeped candied fruit, set in a dome mould — were the standard grand finish of the late nineteenth-century restaurant menu, descended from the French bombe glacée and its cousin the pudding Nesselrode. Named garnishes were the currency of the profession, and dozens of such names circulated in kitchen French without any of them being fixed by an authority. Collections of this sort gathered the material for American households as the domestic ice-cream freezer, the salt-and-ice tub, and later the insulated icebox made it plausible to attempt in a private kitchen what had until then required a hotel's ice room. The instruction to bury the mould in "broken salted ice" is the tell: salt lowers the melting point of ice well below freezing, and that brine bath was the only reliable hardening cabinet a cook had before mechanical refrigeration.