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Raspberry or Peach Frozen Pudding
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 whipped cream.
The frozen fruit pudding may be varied by using macaroons instead of fruit. Dry in the oven one-half pound of macaroons and roll them fine. Add them and one-half cupful of powdered sugar to a quart of cream, whipped dry. Pack and freeze as before.
This is a still-frozen cream — no churning, no custard base — so the whipped cream is doing all the work of keeping it light. Everything else follows from that.
- "Pack and freeze as before"The book is pointing back to an earlier freezing method: the mixture goes into a mould, the mould is buried in a bucket of crushed ice and coarse salt and left several hours. The exact proportions are not repeated here. A covered metal loaf pan in a modern freezer does much the same job in about four to six hours; it will set harder and faster than the original, so let it stand 10 minutes before slicing.
- Whipped "dry"Stiff peaks, just short of the point where the cream breaks into butter. Underwhipped cream weeps and the pudding sets into a solid icy block, since there is no churning to break up crystals.
- MacaroonsAlmond macaroons of the crisp amaretti type, not the soft coconut kind and not French macarons. Half a pound is about 225 g; dry them in a 300F oven for 10-15 minutes until they snap, then crush fine so they do not turn to paste in the cream.
- The sugar looks like a lotTwo cups of powdered sugar per quart of fruit is deliberate — sugar lowers the freezing point and keeps an unchurned mixture from setting rock hard. Cutting it much reduces the sweetness and the texture at the same time.
- Raspberry seedsMashing leaves the seeds in. Pressing the pulp through a fine sieve first gives a smoother pudding; you will lose some volume, so measure the quart after sieving.
- PeachesPeel and stone them, and mash rather than puree to a liquid — a loose puree thins the cream. Very juicy fruit benefits from draining off some free liquid before folding.
- FoldingChill the mashed fruit before it meets the cream; room-temperature fruit deflates whipped cream quickly. Fold in thirds and stop while streaks are still faintly visible.
- YieldUpwards of two quarts, serving eight to ten. It is very rich and was cut in small slices from a mould.
Frozen puddings sat a rung above plain ice cream in late-Victorian and Edwardian menus: moulded, unchurned, meant to be turned out whole and cut at the table, which is why they tend to be grouped apart from the ices. The technique is generally traced to the ice trade he salt-packed freezing pail seem to have made a household mould of frozen cream ordinary enough for a general cookbook by about the turn of the century, where a century earlier it belonged to confectioners and large kitchens. The macaroon variation is a very old confectioner's habit of using dried, crushed almond biscuits as both flavour and body; the same crumbs turn up in charlottes, trifles and the frozen biscuit tortoni sold in American restaurants of the same era.