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Frozen Peaches and Cream
Peel and slice ripe peaches, perfectly fresh and sound. When sliced mix with cream and sugar to taste; freeze.
BISCUIT GLACÉ A LA CHARLES DICKENS.
One pint of syrup (32 deg.), fifteen yolks of eggs, three gills of peach pulp, colored pink with cochineal, one gill of noyeau, half a pint of thick cream and a little chocolate water-ice, made with half a pint of syrup and four ounces of the best chocolate smoothly mixed and frozen ready. • Mix syrup, yolks, peach pulps, noyeau and a few drops of vanilla; whip high; mix with the whipped cream and set in ice for one hour and a half in brick-shaped moulds; then turn out (if very firm) and cut in slices an inch thick and coat them all over, or on top and sides, with the chocolate ice, smoothing with a knife dipped in cold water.
Serve in paper cases. -Catherine Owen.
Two recipes run together here: a plain frozen peach cream, and Catherine Owen's biscuit glacé, an elaborate moulded iced dessert. The second cannot be made as printed, for two separate reasons.
- Fifteen raw yolks, never cookedThe biscuit glacé mixture is whipped cold, folded into cream and frozen. The yolks are never brought anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella is reliably killed, and freezing does not kill it. A modern frozen-custard recipe cooks the base to temperature first; use one of those instead.
- NoyeauNoyau is a liqueur flavoured with the kernels of peaches, apricots or bitter almonds, which contain amygdalin and can release hydrogen cyanide. Period household recipes for steeping crushed kernels in spirit do exist, with no control over the dose. Commercial almond-flavoured liqueurs sold today are a different product; do not substitute a home-steeped kernel infusion.
- CochinealThis one is not the problem. Cochineal is a red colouring made from the dried scale insect Dactylopius coccus and is still a permitted food colour, listed as carmine or E120. It is an allergen for a small number of people and is not vegetarian.
- Syrup at 32 degreesA Baume reading taken with a saccharometer, not an oven or a thermometer setting. Thirty-two degrees Baume is a heavy sugar syrup of roughly 60 per cent sugar, the standard confectioner's stock syrup of the period.
- Gills and pintsA gill is 4 fl oz, or half a cup, so three gills of peach pulp is a cup and a half and one gill of noyeau is half a cup. The pints are American pints of 16 fl oz.
- Brick moulds and paper casesIced puddings were frozen in a brick-shaped mould, turned out, sliced and served in fluted paper cases, as here. The knife dipped in cold water is the correct trick for smoothing the chocolate coating and still works.
- The peaches and creamThe first recipe is unobjectionable: sliced ripe peaches mixed with cream and sugar to taste and frozen. No quantities are given. Without a cooked base or stabiliser it will freeze hard and icy, so serve it the day it is made.
Catherine Owen was the pen name of an American cookery writer of the 1880s, best known for domestic-economy books that taught middle-class households to cook well on a strict budget - which makes her authorship of something this ornate a small surprise, and a reminder that the same writers supplied both the everyday and the show-off pages. Biscuit glace is a French iced dessert: a whipped egg-and-syrup base lightened with cream, frozen in a brick mould and sliced; the "biscuit" is usually explained as a reference to the shape of the slices rather than to any baking, though the derivation is not settled. Naming such dishes after celebrities was common in the period, and the Dickens attribution is best read as a compliment rather than a record of anything he ate. The recipe also shows how much of the late-Victorian dessert repertoire depended on a stocked professional larder - graded syrup measured by saccharometer, cochineal, noyau, a chocolate water-ice already frozen and waiting.