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Frozen Pudding
One pint of milk, two cupfuls of granulated sugar, half cup of flour, two eggs, two tablespoonfuls of gelatine, one quart of cream. One pound French candied fruit, four tablespoonfuls wine. Let the milk come to a boil. Beat the flour, one cupful of sugar and the eggs together and stir into the boiling milk. Cook twenty-one minutes, add the gelatine which has been well dissolved in very little water. Set away to cool. When cold add the wine, sugar and cream. Freeze ten minutes, then add the candied fruit and finish freezing. Pack smoothly in a mould and set away for five hours. When ready to serve dip the mould in warm water, turn out the cream and serve with whipped cream.
A rich cooked-custard ice cream studded with candied fruit — what the nineteenth century called a frozen pudding, and what an Italian shop would have sold as tutti-frutti. The method assumes a hand-crank freezer packed in ice and salt, so a few things need translating.
- The hinge: cook the custard gently"Cook twenty-one minutes" over direct heat will scramble two eggs and half a cup of flour into paste. Do it in a double boiler or over low heat with constant stirring; the flour needs that long to lose its raw taste and the starch protects the eggs, but the mixture must never boil hard once the eggs are in.
- GelatineTwo tablespoonfuls is six teaspoons, nearer two and a half modern envelopes (roughly two-thirds of an ounce) than two. Bloom it in a few tablespoons of cold water, as the recipe directs, then stir it into the hot custard so it dissolves completely. Its job here is body, not set — it keeps the frozen mixture from going icy.
- Sugar, dividedTwo cupfuls total: one goes into the custard with the flour and eggs, the second is added cold with the cream and wine. Two cups for three pints of dairy is sweet by modern taste; a cup and a half still freezes properly.
- "Freeze ten minutes, then add the fruit"In a modern churn, run the mixture until it is thick as soft-serve, then add the fruit through the top so it disperses without jamming the dasher. Chill the custard thoroughly — overnight is best — before it goes into the machine.
- French candied fruitImported glace fruit: cherries, apricots, pineapple, citron, angelica. A pound is a great deal for this quantity; three-quarters of a pound is plenty. Chop it small. The recipe puts the four tablespoons of wine (sherry, Madeira or Marsala) into the cooled custard, but soaking the chopped fruit in it for an hour instead softens the fruit so it does not freeze to gravel.
- The five-hour restThis is ripening, originally done in a mould buried in ice and coarse salt. A covered loaf pan or metal mould in the freezer does the same work; press the mixture in without air pockets and cover the surface directly with plastic before the lid.
- UnmouldingA brief dip in warm water and an inverted plate still works, but modern home freezers run colder than an ice-and-salt pack, so let the mould stand at room temperature five to ten minutes before turning out or the surface will be too hard to slice cleanly.
- YieldNearer three quarts; the milk and cream alone come to three pints before sugar, fruit and churning. Sixteen or more servings.
Frozen pudding was a standard of American dessert cookery for much of the nineteenth century and into the First World War, and the name is worth unpacking: it is not a pudding in the boiled-and-steamed sense but an ice cream given a custard base and fruit, moulded and turned out so it could be sliced at table like one. The style is often said to derive from Italian confectioners working in Paris and then in eastern American cities, whose tutti-frutti ices and biscuits tortoni relied on the same combination of frozen custard and candied fruit, though the line of descent is traditional rather than documented; "French candied fruit" in a recipe of this date meant expensive imported glacé fruit sold by weight at a good grocer. That it sits in a chapter called Dainty Dishes is telling. Making it required a hand-crank freezer, a decorative mould, and a reliable supply of block ice and rock salt — all of which the household ice trade had made available in middle-class kitchens, and all of which marked the dish as company food rather than everyday fare.