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Juditha
(A recipe of the Polish Jews.) Cook 1 pint of gooseberries, mash, and strain them. Add 2 beaten eggs, and sugar to taste. Have ready a mould of vanilla ice cream frozen, scoop out the centre, fill it with this, freeze it again, and turn out on a dish. This is a very good and little known combination.
The construction is a bombe: a shell of vanilla ice cream hollowed out and filled with a fruit centre. The filling as written is the problem.
- Raw egg in a frozen fillingThe gooseberries are cooked, but the two beaten eggs are stirred into the strained purée and never cooked again — the mixture goes straight into the freezer. Freezing does not kill Salmonella; it preserves it, and the thawed filling sits at serving temperature while the bombe is turned out and cut. Use a current recipe for any egg-enriched frozen filling, one that either cooks the eggs to a custard or specifies pasteurised egg.
- Why the eggs are there at allThe recipe gives no reason for the eggs, but in a fruit centre beaten egg would act as a binder, adding protein (and, from the yolk, a little fat) that keeps the pur he from freezing to a solid brick of ice. That is inference rather than anything the book states.
- What a pint of gooseberries gives youA pint of green gooseberries is somewhere around 12 oz, and after cooking and sieving out skins and seeds you are left with perhaps a cup of pur he. The recipe never says how large a mould is meant. Gooseberries in this period were generally picked hard and sour for cooking and preserving.
- "Sugar to taste" is doing real workSugar controls the freezing point as well as the flavour. Under-sweetened fruit pur he freezes hard and icy; a very sweet one sets soft and may slump when the bombe is unmoulded. No quantity is given, so the amount is left to the cook.
- Freezing, then and now"Frozen" here would have meant churned in a hand-cranked ice-and-salt freezer and then packed into a mould buried in more ice and salt to ripen. Set in a modern freezer, the bombe will want a short rest at room temperature before it will turn out cleanly.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre of collected "foreign" recipes gathered from immigrant communities and travellers, and the parenthetical attribution — "a recipe of the Polish Jews" — is doing the work of the whole page: the interest for the original readers lay in the provenance as much as the dish. Gooseberries (agrest in Polish) were a common summer fruit in Poland and the Pale, cheap and sour, and usually cooked into soups, compotes and preserves rather than eaten raw, so a gooseberry pur he would have been the least exotic part of this to a Warsaw kitchen. The form, however, is French: a hollowed ice cream mould refilled with a contrasting centre is the classic bombe, a restaurant and confectioner's technique of the nineteenth century. The name Juditha is presumably for Judith; no documented origin for this particular naming appears to survive.