Oh hello!
Merry Christmas!
Today I'm making a Nesselrode cream
and I need to choose a good mould.
I'm going to choose one with a pattern on it.
Ah! Pineapples are very fashionable.
For this recipe you will need:
water
caster sugar
chestnuts
gelatine
cream
vanilla
Lemon
cherries
and candied peel
This dish is mostly made up of cream and chestnuts.
Annie Chase, the scullery maid, and Sylvia have been helping me prepare the chestnuts
Firstly, Annie boiled the chestnuts to remove the hard outer shell
- it's very messy and very hard on the fingernails. Silvia then reboiled the
chestnuts again in a syrup of water and sugar to soften them. And now I'm going
to push them through a sieve.
Chestnuts have a lovely flavour, even if they are
a trial to prepare.
You can buy them in tins.
They won't be as nice.
There are lots of different recipes for Nesselrode pudding. Some of them are iced puddings
but this one is a blancmange, or a 'set cream', and altogether more suitable for
this family at Christmas.
Now I've warmed half the cream, I'm going to sweeten it
and infuse it with some lemon
and a little vanilla essence.
Now the cream is warm enough to melt my gelatine, which I've been soaking.
This recipe is from one of my favourite authors, Eliza Action.
I've even noted it in my own book, because I like it so much.
I'm now going to mix the rest of my cream with my chestnuts.
The sweet needs to be light and airy so we need to mix it well.
This is a seasonal dish.
We serve fruit and vegetables out of season - strawberries in December show a family is
wealthy and can afford a good gardener.
But sometimes it's nice to revel in things when they're at their best.
I'm now going to combine my two mixtures together.
You must wait until your mix is really thick
before you add your dried fruit
otherwise it will sink to the bottom
and we wouldn't want that.
So now I can add my candied peel
and my dried cherries.
And now it's ready to go into my mould, which I've already lined with a little oil.
And once it's full, it then needs putting aside so it can set.
Now that it's set, it's time to turn it out, so just work the edges a little away from the mould
and then let gravity do the rest.
This dish doesn't need any decoration. It looks splendid enough on its own.
But I am going to garnish it a little with candied peel and angelica.
And there you are - Nesselrode cream.