Home › Ices, Preserves, and Confections › Iced Raisin Pudding
Iced Raisin Pudding
(France.) Pick and seed 1/2 pound of fine raisins, add 1/2 gill of maraschino cordial, and simmer until soft. Beat yolks of 6 eggs and 6 ounces of sugar, add 1 1/2 pints of cream, and stir until thick. Then add 1 1/2 ounces of melted gelatine, stir, and add 1/2 gill more cordial. Pack into a mould, set on ice, but do not freeze. Serve with little fancy cakes.
This is not an ice at all but a moulded raisin bavarois — a stirred custard set with gelatine and chilled hard. Two things decide whether it works: cooking the custard properly and using far less gelatine than the original calls for.
- Cook the custard, do not just stir it"Stir until thick" assumes a saucepan over gentle heat: yolks, sugar and cream stirred constantly until the mixture coats a spoon, around 175F. It must not reach a simmer or the yolks will scramble; strain it as soon as it thickens.
- Gelatine quantities are not transferableAn ounce and a half of modern powdered gelatine in three cups of custard would set to rubber. Period gelatine was sold in sheets or shreds of uncertain and inconsistent strength, and the recipe's "melted gelatine" may mean an already-dissolved preparation rather than dry weight. For roughly 1 1/2 pints of cream, about 2 to 3 teaspoons of modern powdered gelatine (a scant 1/4 oz), bloomed in cold water and dissolved, gives a spoonable mould.
- A gillTaking the gill as half a cup (4 fl oz), 1/2 gill is 2 fluid ounces — 1/4 cup; by the British imperial gill of 5 fl oz it would be nearer 2 1/2 fl oz. The recipe uses that measure twice: once to simmer the raisins, once stirred into the finished custard.
- Maraschino cordialThis means true maraschino, the clear dry cherry liqueur from the Dalmatian coast, not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Kirsch is the nearest substitute if maraschino is unavailable.
- Seeded raisins"Pick and seed" belongs to an era before seedless raisins were standard. Muscat raisins still carry seeds; ordinary supermarket raisins need only picking over for stems.
- Set on ice, do not freezeThe instruction is literal. The mould goes into a bath of ice, or the refrigerator, for four hours or more until firm. Freezing would ruin the texture, since a gelatine custard is not churned and would set icy and grainy.
- UnmouldingDip the mould briefly in warm water to the rim, dry it, and invert onto a chilled plate. Oiling the mould very lightly first with a neutral oil makes this easier.
- Yield and serviceRoughly six to eight servings. The "little fancy cakes" of the period were langues de chat, ladyfingers or small macaroons — something dry and crisp against the cream.
Behind the label "iced" sits a bavarois, the moulded cream custard that French kitchens made in vast variety through the nineteenth century and that appears in Carême and Escoffier alike, flavoured with coffee, fruit purees or liqueurs. Maraschino is generally traced to Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, distilled from marasca cherries with their crushed stones, and by 1900 it was a familiar flavouring in the confectioner's repertoire — sweet and faintly bitter. The entry is headed simply "(France.)", and it assumes the cook already knows how to make a stirred custard: the instructions record the flavouring and the proportions, and leave the technique to the reader.