Home › Dainty Dishes › Frozen Strawberry Pudding
Frozen Strawberry Pudding
Line a mould one and a half inches thick with rich ice cream, fill the center with fresh strawberries Cover the berries with cream. Pack in ice and salt for two hours.
This is a bombe in all but name: a shell of ice cream lining a chilled mould, a fruit centre, and a spell buried in ice and salt to set the whole thing solid. The original assumes a household with an ice chest, a wooden freezer pail, and rock salt on hand.
- The hinge: work fast and coldThe mould, the ice cream and your spatula all need to be as cold as you can get them, or the lining slumps to the bottom before it sets. Chill the mould in the freezer, line it in stages, and return it to the freezer between passes rather than trying to build the full inch and a half at once.
- "Rich ice cream"In period usage this points to an ice cream generous in cream, whether a cooked custard or a plain Philadelphia-style cream ice; sources differ. Whichever you make, the fat is structural here, since the lining has to hold a vertical wall against the fruit.
- Ice and salt, in proportionThe old freezing pack is commonly given as about three parts crushed ice to one part coarse rock salt by volume, layered around the sealed mould, with the seam of the mould sealed against brine. The recipe allows two hours in that pack; a modern freezer runs warmer than a salt-ice pack and will need considerably longer.
- Fresh strawberries freeze hardWhole berries frozen plain turn into icy pebbles that will not cut with a spoon. Halve or slice them and macerate in sugar for half an hour first, or fold them into a light sugar syrup, so they stay tender in the finished pudding.
- "Cover the berries with cream"Ambiguous in the original. Plain heavy cream will freeze into a solid slab; whipped cream, lightly sweetened, freezes soft, and may be what was intended, though the text does not say. Either way it is worth a final skin of ice cream over the top to seal the centre in.
- UnmouldingDip the closed mould in cool water for a few seconds, run a thin knife around the rim, and turn it out onto a chilled plate. Then back into the freezer for fifteen minutes to firm the surface before it goes to the table.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no mould size or yield; a mould of about a quart and a half would serve roughly eight. Cut in wedges so each one shows the ring of ice cream around the fruit.
Moulded frozen puddings of this kind descend from the French bombe glaçada, which reached American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century and became a fixture of formal dinners once commercial ice harvesting made a reliable supply cheap. The instruction to "pack in ice and salt" is not a flourish but the only freezing method most households had: salt lowers the melting point of ice, and the brine that results draws heat out of the mould fast enough to set cream solid. Such a dish was understood less as dessert than as display, the sort of thing brought out whole so the table could admire the ring of pink fruit inside its white wall before anyone ate a spoonful.