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Nesselrode Ice Cream
Take one pound of chestnuts, boil until tender, peel and grate, then mix well with a pint of milk. Beat until light the yolks of thirteen eggs, add to them one and a half pounds of pulverized sugar, also three pints of boiling cream, in which you have boiled a vanilla bean and four ounces of chocolate. Strain and stir until quite cold. Add apricot marmalade, and any kind of candied fruits that may be preferred, chopped fine. Then freeze very gently.
A rich frozen custard built on chestnut purée, scaled for a large Victorian household. The quantities are enormous by modern standards and the chestnut work is most of the labour.
- ScaleThree pints of cream, a pint of milk, thirteen yolks and a pound and a half of sugar will yield roughly a gallon of finished ice cream, more than most domestic machines will hold. Quartering the recipe gives about a quart and still works.
- ChestnutsThe recipe does not say whether the pound is weighed in the shell or shelled; if in the shell, expect about 12 oz of peeled meat. Score each nut, boil or roast, and peel while hot, since the inner skin sets like paper once cool. Unsweetened jarred or vacuum-packed chestnuts, or plain chestnut purée, substitute directly.
- Cook the custardPouring boiling cream onto thirteen yolks may not carry the mixture to a safe, thickened state on its own. Return it to the pan and stir over low heat until it coats the spoon and reads 170-175F, then strain.
- Pulverized sugarThis is finely ground sugar, closest to today's caster or superfine. Ordinary granulated will dissolve in the hot custard without trouble.
- ChocolateFour ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, boiled with the cream and the vanilla bean. Nineteenth-century block chocolate was bitter and coarse; unsweetened chocolate, not a modern sweetened bar, keeps the balance right against a pound and a half of sugar.
- Unmeasured additionsThe marmalade and candied fruits are left to the cook. For the full batch, about a cup of apricot preserve and a cup of finely chopped candied fruit is in keeping; halve or quarter with the rest. Fold them in after the custard is cold, not before.
- "Freeze very gently"In a hand-cranked pail this probably meant slow, steady turning rather than hurrying the freeze. In a modern machine, churn as usual, then ripen in the freezer for several hours; the chestnut and fruit make a dense mixture that firms slowly.
- ServingThe recipe gives no direction here, but Nesselrode mixtures were often moulded and turned out in slices rather than scooped. Pack the churned ice cream into a loaf tin or bombe mould lined with plastic, freeze hard, and slice.
Nesselrode is generally traced to Count Karl von Nesselrode, the Russian foreign minister of the first half of the nineteenth century, whose chef is traditionally credited with the original frozen chestnut pudding of purée, candied fruits soaked in maraschino, and custard. The name attached itself to any chestnut-and-fruit ice through the rest of the century; the chocolate here appears to be a variation rather than part of the classical formula. The blight first noticed in the early 1900s destroyed the American chestnut, though much of the culinary trade already relied on imported European nuts. The dish outlived its own fashion in New York as Nesselrode pie, a rum-and-candied-fruit chiffon that stayed on restaurant menus into the 1960s.