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French Nut Pudding, Iced
Chop 4 ounces of shelled and blanched nuts, filberts, or pecans, add 4 ounces of sugar, and cook until brown but not burnt. Add 1/2 a pint of milk and a spoonful of vanilla. The nuts must be pounded before adding to the rest. Mix yolks of 8 eggs with 5 ounces of sugar, add the nuts, etc., and 1 pint of boiling cream. Stir until smooth, strain it, and freeze 2 hours. Serve it with a cold custard sauce.
This is a praline ice cream: caramelised nuts ground to a paste, folded into a rich yolk custard. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows how to make a boiled custard and owns an ice-and-salt freezer, so the important steps are compressed almost to nothing.
- The hinge is the pralineCooking 4 oz nuts with 4 oz sugar "until brown but not burnt" means making praline: the sugar melts, colours to a medium amber, and coats the nuts. Pour it onto oiled parchment, let it set hard, then break it up and grind it. Take it past deep amber and the whole ice tastes acrid, and there is no rescuing it.
- Pounded means pasteThe instruction to pound the nuts before adding is easy to skim past. In a food processor, run the cooled praline until it is oily and paste-like rather than sandy, or the flavour stays locked in the fragments and most of it ends up in the strainer.
- Cook the custard, do not just stir itEight yolks with boiling cream poured over will thicken, but pouring alone is not reliable heating. Return the mixture to low heat and cook to 175-180F, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon. That both sets the custard and pasteurises the yolks.
- Pints and spoonfulsIf you read this as US measure, a half pint of milk is 1 cup and a pint of cream is 2 cups; British imperial pints run a quarter larger. Either works. "A spoonful of vanilla" is genuinely vague; 1 to 2 teaspoons of extract suits this quantity.
- Strain, then chillStraining catches curdled specks and coarse nut grit. Chill the strained base thoroughly, ideally overnight, before it goes near the machine; a warm base churns to a coarse, icy texture.
- "Freeze 2 hours"That is the working time in a hand-cranked bucket packed with ice and rock salt. In a modern churn it is 20-30 minutes to soft-serve consistency, then 3-4 hours in the freezer to harden.
- The custard sauceThe "cold custard sauce" is crème anglaise: milk or thin cream, yolks and sugar cooked to the same 175-180F and chilled. Made plain, it sets off the praline without competing with it.
- YieldThe base comes to roughly a quart, serving eight to ten in the small portions the period expected.
Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) gathered dishes from European kitchens for American readers, and this one is French in method as much as in name. Caramelised nuts ground to a paste are pralin, the flavouring base that gives praline its name, generally traced to the household of the 17th-century marshal of France the Maréchal du Plessis-Praslin, whose cook is traditionally credited with the sugared almond. Filberts (hazelnuts) are the older European choice; the alternative of pecans is the American concession. Grouping it with the other frozen sweets reflects a period when such desserts were still labour: a bucket freezer, a supply of ice, and coarse salt to drive the brine below freezing, all of which made an iced pudding a dish for company rather than a weeknight.