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Strawberry Frozen Pudding
A delicious strawberry frozen pudding may be made by mashing the fruit, adding to it two cupfuls of powdered sugar to every quart of strawberries and folding in carefully one quart of cream, whipped. Fill it into a mould, put on the cover, insure its safety from salt water by pasting a strip of buttered paper over the puncture and pack in 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 an hour or two before the cream is added to it.
This is a still-frozen pudding, sometimes called a biscuit glacé or semifreddo: nothing churns it, so all of its lightness comes from the whipped cream folded in at the start. A few notes before you begin.
- The hinge: whip and fold properlyBecause the mould is never stirred or churned, the air you beat into the cream is the only air the pudding will ever have. Whip to soft-to-medium peaks, not stiff, and fold in thirds so the mixture stays aerated; overworked or under-whipped cream gives a dense, icy block.
- "Powdered sugar" in 1900"Powdered sugar" -- in cookbooks of this period the term often meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is a close match and dissolves readily in the mashed fruit.
- A quart of strawberriesBy volume, about 1.5 lb of whole berries, yielding somewhere between 2 and 3 cups mashed. Two cups of sugar to that quantity is very sweet by modern taste, but sugar is what keeps a still-frozen mixture from setting rock hard, so reduce it by no more than a quarter.
- Ice and saltPack the sealed mould in a tub with roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, burying it completely, and drain off meltwater as it rises. Four hours is realistic. A modern freezer will do the same job but considerably more slowly -- allow several hours at least, and overnight is safer -- with the mould covered and wrapped.
- The buttered paperOld moulds had a small vent or a loose-fitting lid, and brine seeping in ruins the pudding. A strip of buttered paper pasted over the seam was the seal of the day; kitchen foil pressed tight, or a mould wrapped in plastic film then foil, does it now.
- The pineapple variationMacerating chopped pineapple in the sugar for an hour or two draws out juice and softens the fibres. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which will prevent gelatin setting and will thin a custard; in the short time before this mixture is frozen it is unlikely to trouble the cream, so keep this version as written.
- Yield and servingUpwards of two quarts, depending on how much volume survives the folding; serves ten or more. Dip the mould briefly in warm water to unmould, and let the pudding stand ten minutes before slicing; straight from hard-frozen it tastes of very little.
Frozen puddings occupy their own small aristocracy in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks. This one is a still-frozen type: the mixture is sealed in a fluted or domed mould, buried in ice and salt, and turned out whole at the table -- though other frozen puddings of the period were frozen in a churn first and only then packed into a mould. The recipe is a fair index of what a household needed before mechanical refrigeration was common: a quart of cream, a supply of ice bought or cut in winter and kept in an icehouse, coarse rock salt, and a servant or a patient cook willing to repack the tub. Strawberries were an intensely seasonal fruit before wide-scale shipping, and pineapple, tinned or fresh, was increasingly available in American cities by this period.