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Imperial Iced Pudding
Prepare a vanilla ice cream, adding to the freezer two ounces peeled and finely chopped almonds, twelve candied cherries cut in halves, four slices candied pineapple cut into very small dices, and two tablespoons good kirsch. Mix well with the spatula, then transfer the cream into a dome-shape quart mould, cover with a sheet of paper, then lightly close the mould. Bury it in the ice-cream pail for one hour, remove, dip in lukewarm water for a few seconds, wipe it, unmould on a cold dish with a folded napkin and serve.
This is a bombe: flavoured ice cream packed into a dome mould and hardened in a salt-and-ice bath. Everything about it works in a modern freezer, but the ripening times change.
- The hinge: chill everything firstMould, spatula and serving dish should all be cold before the ice cream goes near them. A warm mould melts the outer shell, which then refreezes grainy and dulls the clean edge the dome depends on.
- "Bury it in the ice-cream pail"The original means packing the sealed mould in a bucket of crushed ice and coarse salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt, which sits well below 32F. One hour in that bath is not one hour in a home freezer; allow four to six hours at 0F, or overnight.
- Sheet of paperThe paper kept brine and ice water off the surface. Plastic wrap pressed directly onto the ice cream does the job better and also keeps ice crystals from forming under the lid.
- Kirsch and freezing pointAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so the modest two tablespoons in a quart matters: add much more and the bombe will not set firm enough to unmould.
- Add-ins go in cold and lateFold the almonds, cherries, pineapple and kirsch in when the ice cream is at soft-serve stage, working quickly with a spatula. Modern churn-in-the-machine timing means the last minute of the churn or immediately after.
- Candied pineapple and cherriesUse glace fruit, not the wet maraschino cherries sold for cocktails, which carry too much syrup and bleed pink through the cream. The recipe asks for 'very small dices', so keep the pineapple pieces well under a quarter inch.
- UnmouldingA few seconds in lukewarm water is right; longer and the dome slumps. Wipe the mould dry, invert onto the cold dish, and if it resists, wrap a warm cloth around the mould for a moment rather than dipping again.
- YieldA quart mould gives six to eight servings. Cut in wedges from the apex so each slice shows the fruit through the section.
This is a bombe glacée in the classical French repertoire, and "Imperial" belongs to the same family of grand nineteenth-century names—Nesselrode, Mont Blanc, Diplomate—that restaurant kitchens attached to moulded ices distinguished mainly by their garnish of candied fruit and liqueur. Alexander Filippini, whose International Cook Book this comes from, worked at Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe reads exactly like a professional's shorthand: no sugar quantities, no churning instructions, because a vanilla ice cream was assumed knowledge and the only thing worth writing down was the dressing-up. The hand-cranked freezer and the salt-packed pail it presumes were standard equipment in a well-run household kitchen by 1906. Kirsch, distilled from cherries, was the conventional partner for candied cherries in these compositions.