Another recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks: Ultra Select Dishes for Afternoon Teas, published in 1913. It features recipes from high-end hotel chefs of the time!
This dessert recipe comes from Ernest Otzenberger, chef de cuisine at Hotel Dennis in Atlantic City, New Jersey. His bio in the book is pretty sparse, but it says he was formerly a chef for G.W. Vanderbilt in Paris, London, and New York.
This recipe is for a pudding which I think was named after the House of Romanov, who were still in power in Russia at the time. You may recognize them from the movie Anastasia (1997), one of my favorites– and not just because I have the same name as the protagonist!
(The other recipe Otzenberger contributed was named after Napoleon. I feel like there’s some kind of theme there…)
🌟 More recipes from Ultra Select Dishes / More Edwardian era stuff
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Original Recipe
PUDDING A LA ROMANOFF
Mix in a vessel one pint of Apricot pulp, five ounces sugar, one gill of almond milk, and a half gill of Kirschwasser. Bring it to twenty-two degrees, then strain through a sieve and freeze. Mix in as much whipped cream. Have a three pint pudding mould packed in ice. Coat the inside with strawberry ice cream, and fill it in layers, composed of the above prepared cream. Between each layer, arrange a macedoine of fresh fruit, macerated in Kirsch, and some biscuits soaked in maraschino. Let the last layer be ice cream. Pack and freeze for one hour and a half; unmould and serve with a separate sauce made of strawberry ice cream, mixing a little Kirsch and whipped cream.
Recipe Card
Pudding a la Romanoff
Print Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 pint apricot pulp
- 5 oz sugar
- 1 gill almond milk
- 1/2 gill Kirsch
- whipped cream
- strawberry ice cream
- fresh fruit cut into cubes and soaked in Kirsch
- biscuits soaked in maraschino
Sauce
- strawberry ice cream
- Kirsch
- whipped cream
Instructions
- Mix in a vessel one pint of Apricot pulp, five ounces sugar, one gill of almond milk, and a half gill of Kirschwasser. Bring it to twenty- two degrees, then strain through a sieve and freeze.
- Mix in as much whipped cream.
- Have a three pint pudding mould packed in ice. Coat the inside with strawberry ice cream, and fill it in layers, composed of the above prepared cream. Between each layer, arrange a macedoine of fresh fruit, macerated in Kirsch, and some biscuits soaked in maraschino. Let the last layer be ice cream.
- Pack and freeze for one hour and a half; unmould and serve with a separate sauce made of strawberry ice cream, mixing a little Kirsch and whipped cream.
Recipes Notes
- A “gill” is a quarter of a pint, per this Wikipedia article.
- Do you think “twenty-two degrees” means C or F? It’s an American book, so I’m assuming F, but…hm….
- “Macedoine is a French cooking term used to describe the process of dicing food items into 1/4 inch cubes, used for vegetables or fruits or for both, served as cold or hot, raw or cooked.” per Food & Beverage Knowledge
- Macerating fruit basically means soaking it in a liquid to make it softer and sweeter. Yum!
- As for the hotel: Hotel Dennis no longer exists, but you can read a bit of its history on Wikipedia here.
Source
Hoff, A. C. (1913) Ultra Select Dishes for Afternoon Teas. Los Angeles, Cal., International publishing co. [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/13025302/.
