Chipolatapudding (Layered Gelatin Pudding)

The chipolatapudding is a relic of the grand Dutch table — the kind of towering moulded cream that a well-off eighteenth-century household set out at the end of a feast, glittering with candied fruit and scented with liqueur. It has almost nothing to do with the little sausage of the same name; here chipolata is an old cookery term for a rich dessert stiff with fruit, and this is its most elaborate Dutch form: custard, cream and gelatin layered with ladyfingers and turned out in a shining dome.

A pudding from the confident century

Puddings like this belong to the eighteenth century, when the first printed Dutch cookbooks appeared and the wealthy merchant class was learning the refined French repertoire of moulded creams and jellies. Gelatin — expensive, fiddly, a sign of a serious kitchen — made possible desserts that stood tall and sliced clean, and candied fruit and imported liqueur signalled a household that could afford them. The chipolatapudding survived into twentieth-century Dutch cookbooks as the showpiece for Christmas and celebration tables, one of the last of the great moulded desserts.

The setting point is everything

This is the one recipe here that rewards nerve and timing. A gelatin cream must be folded together at a precise moment — when the custard has cooled to the point of just beginning to set, thick as unbeaten egg white. Too warm, and the whipped cream deflates and the fruit sinks; too cold, and the base seizes into lumps before you can layer it. Watch it, stir it, and move fast once it mounds on the spoon.

The old moulded puddings ask only one thing of the cook: to catch the exact minute the cream begins to set, and act.

Turn it out cold onto a good plate and let it stand a moment before slicing, so the layers of biscuit and fruited cream show clean against the knife.