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Montrose Pudding
Scald one pint of cream in a double boiler; add the yolks of six eggs and one cupful of sugar beaten together until light, and stir until it thickens. Take quickly from the fire, add another pint of cream and set aside until cold; add one teaspoonful of vanilla and two tablespoonfuls of maraschino, and freeze. Boil together for five minutes three-quarters of a cupful of sugar and one pint of water and cool; add one cupful of syrup from canned strawberries, one teaspoonful of lemon juice, and freeze. Line a mold with one inch layer of the frozen cream, fill the center with the water ice and cover with the remainder of the cream. Over the top lay a piece of waxed paper, then put * on the cover and bind the edge with a strip of muslin dipped in melted butter. Pack in a mixture of fine ice and salt and set aside for at least four hours to freeze. Turn out carefully and serve with the sauce poured round it.
This is a bombe: a frozen custard shell around a fruit ice, moulded and buried in ice and salt. Everything about it works in a modern kitchen, but the freezing method needs translating.
- The hinge: don't let the custard boilCream and yolks thicken at about 170-175F and scramble not far above. Stir constantly over the double boiler until it coats a spoon, then pull it off and add the second pint of cold cream immediately, which stops the cooking.
- Freezing without ice and saltChurn both mixtures separately in an ice cream machine until softly frozen, then line the mould with the custard ice and fill with the water ice. The sealed mould can go into a home freezer for four hours or more instead of a salt-and-ice pack.
- If you do pack itUse roughly three parts crushed ice to one part coarse rock salt by volume, packed to the top of the mould. The butter-soaked muslin band is a gasket, keeping brine out of the pudding, and it is worth copying if you use salt.
- MaraschinoThis means maraschino liqueur, the clear cherry-kernel spirit, not the syrup from a jar of dyed cocktail cherries. Two tablespoons is enough to flavour without softening the freeze.
- Strawberry syrupCanned strawberries in heavy syrup are uncommon now. Frozen strawberries thawed with sugar give the same thing: mash, drain, and use the drained juice, adding sugar until it tastes frankly sweet, since freezing dulls sweetness.
- Sugar syrupThree-quarters of a cup of sugar boiled with a pint of water gives a fairly light syrup. The whole water ice will freeze hard and granular unless the syrup and fruit juice together are quite sweet; taste before churning.
- The sauceThe recipe ends by calling for a sauce it never gives. A thin fresh strawberry purée sharpened with lemon, or a maraschino-spiked fruit syrup, is in keeping.
- Yield and turning outOver two quarts of mixture in total before churning, serving ten or so. Dip the sealed mould in warm water for a few seconds, invert onto a chilled plate, and return it to the freezer for ten minutes if the surface has slumped.
Moulded frozen puddings of this kind were the standard grand dessert of late nineteenth-century American entertaining, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s carry dozens of them, often named for a place, a person or a title in the manner of hotel and catering menus of the day. Montrose is a Scottish burgh and a ducal title; as with Nesselrode, the name attaches to the mould and the combination rather than to any documented origin, and no particular claim should be read into it. What the recipe really records is a piece of technology: the hand-cranked freezer and the pewter or tin bombe mould, which between them let a household turn out something that had previously required a professional confectioner and an icehouse. The maraschino points the same way, an imported Dalmatian liqueur that shows up constantly in American ices of this period as a mark of refinement.