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Frozen Fruit Pudding
A delicious strawberry, raspberry, or peach frozen pudding may be made by mashing the fruit, adding to it two cupfuls of powdered sugar to every quart of fruit, and folding in carefully one quart of cream whipped. Fill it into a mould, put on the cover, and to prevent salt water from entering paste a slip of buttered paper around the edge. Pack it in cracked ice and salt for four hours. If pineapple is used, it should be chopped very fine, covered with the sugar and allowed to stand for two hours before the cream is added to it.
The frozen fruit pudding may be varied by using macaroons and candied cherries.
This is a still-frozen cream — no churning, no custard base — so the whipped cream and the sugar are doing all the work that a machine would otherwise do. Get those two right and the rest is packing and waiting.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe air beaten into the quart of cream is the only thing standing between this and a block of sweet ice. Whip to soft peaks, mash the fruit to a coarse pulp rather than a purée, and fold in three additions with a spatula. Overworked cream collapses and the pudding freezes hard and grainy.
- Powdered sugarIn a book of this period "powdered sugar" usually means a fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Either works here; confectioners' dissolves faster in cold fruit and gives a slightly softer set. Two cups per quart of fruit sounds extreme but sugar is what keeps an unchurned cream scoopable.
- A quart of fruitMeasured as prepared fruit, so roughly 1.5 to 2 lb of hulled strawberries or raspberries, or about 2 lb of peaches once peeled and stoned. Frozen fruit, thawed and drained, is acceptable; drain it well or the extra juice will turn to ice crystals.
- CreamUse heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent fat or above. Anything labelled light cream or single cream will not hold air through four hours of freezing.
- Ice and salt, or the freezerThe old method is a mould buried in a 3:1 mix of cracked ice to rock salt, which drops the brine well below 32F and freezes the pudding through in about four hours. A modern freezer at 0F will do the same job in six to eight hours; use a metal loaf pan or pudding basin, cover with film pressed to the surface, then foil. The buttered paper collar is only needed against salt brine.
- PineappleThe two-hour maceration draws out juice and softens the fibres — worth doing, and canned crushed pineapple, drained hard, is the easier route. Do not substitute the pineapple step for gelatin-set desserts elsewhere; here it matters only for texture.
- Macaroons and cherriesThe macaroons meant are crisp almond ones, crushed and folded in at the end so they stay slightly chewy. Halve the candied cherries and rinse off surface syrup, or they sink.
- Serving and yieldYield is generous: allowing for the cream roughly doubling in volume, expect nearer three quarts, so 12 or more portions. Because there is no churned overrun it freezes very firm: move it to the refrigerator for 15 to 20 minutes, then dip the mould briefly in warm water before turning out.
Frozen puddings of this kind sit between the ice cream and the moulded bombe, and they were popular in late nineteenth-century American households in part because they needed no freezer crank — only a lidded mould, cracked ice and coarse salt, packed in a wooden tub or pail. The salt is not flavouring; it depresses the melting point of the ice so the surrounding brine falls below freezing and draws heat out of the mould, a trick European confectioners had used since at least the sixteenth century and which reached ordinary American kitchens on the back of the commercial ice trade. A quart of whipped cream and two cups of sugar made this a display dish for company rather than everyday eating, and the suggested additions of macaroons and candied cherries are typical of the period's iced desserts, close to what the French called a biscuit glacé.