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Iced Pudding, Portugais
Prepare a pint only vanilla ice cream adding in the freezer a half gill Malaga wine. Thoroughly pick and soak in water for fifteen minutes two ounces Malaga grapes, drain, remove the seeds, and add to the vanilla with an ounce of candied, chopped orange peel and half pint whipped cream. Mix well with the spatula, then fill up a quart mould with the preparation; tightly cover the mould, bury it in the same ice cream pail and let freeze for two hours. Remove, dip in lukewarm water for a few seconds, unmould on a cold dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A moulded bombe in the grand-hotel style: a small quantity of ice cream lightened with whipped cream, studded with fruit, packed into a mould and re-frozen. Nothing here is difficult, but the original assumes an ice-cream pail full of salted ice, which is where most of the translation work lies.
- The hinge: freeze it hard, unmould it fastThe mixture is about one third whipped cream by volume and carries wine, so it sets soft. It must be thoroughly firm before you turn it out, and the dip in lukewarm water should last only a few seconds — long enough to loosen the shell, not to melt the surface.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of Malaga is 2 fluid ounces, about 1/4 cup. Added to a pint of ice cream that is enough alcohol to keep the pudding pleasantly soft without stopping it freezing.
- Malaga wineA sweet fortified wine from Málaga, once a fixture of American and British sideboards and now uncommon. Pedro Ximénez sherry, a cream sherry or a sweet Madeira all stand in without distorting the dish.
- "Malaga grapes"The soaking and seeding suggest dried Malaga muscats — large seeded raisins on the stem, which would be what "pick" refers to — though the term was also used at the time for the big seeded fresh table grapes imported from Spain. Muscat raisins are still sold, usually seedless; two ounces is roughly a third of a cup.
- Freezing without an ice pail"Bury it in the same ice cream pail" means packing the closed mould in the churn's ice and coarse salt, which pulls heat out fast. In a domestic freezer set to 0F allow four to six hours, or overnight, rather than the two hours given.
- Sealing the mouldSalt water seeping past the lid was the original worry, hence "tightly cover." In a modern freezer the risk is ice crystals and freezer smell instead: press plastic wrap onto the surface before the lid goes on.
- YieldA quart mould gives six to eight small servings; this is a rich sweet meant to end a long meal. Serve it in slices, not scoops.
- The folded napkinNot decoration. The napkin on the cold platter absorbs meltwater and keeps the unmoulded pudding from sliding as it is carried to the table.
Iced puddings of this kind — a flavoured base bound with whipped cream, moulded, packed in ice and served turned out whole — were standard closing dishes in the restaurant cooking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a kitchen with an ice cellar could produce them daily. Names like Portugais functioned as menu shorthand for a fixed combination rather than a claim of national origin; here it signals the Iberian pairing of a sweet fortified wine with muscat raisins and candied orange peel, though Málaga itself is Spanish. Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book as a survey of these dishes for households ambitious enough to attempt them, and the instruction to bury the mould in "the same ice cream pail" tells you what such a household had in its kitchen: a hand-cranked freezer, a block of ice and a supply of coarse salt.