Beat the yolks of 4 eggs with 1 cup of pulverized sugar; add 1 pint of cream; stir well until very light. Then add 1 small can of shredded pineapple and crush a few macaroons. Mix well with a small glass of brandy. Let freeze and serve in small glasses.
January 11 — No. 11
French
This is a still-frozen brandy-and-pineapple cream built on raw egg yolks that are never cooked at any stage. That single fact governs everything below.
- The yolks are never heatedThe mixture goes straight from the bowl to the freezer. Nothing in the method brings the yolks anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella in egg yolk is reliably killed, and freezing does not destroy the organism — it simply holds it dormant until the dessert thaws in the mouth. A modern frozen-custard recipe cooks the yolks, cream and sugar to a stirred custard first; use one of those instead.
- Alcohol is not a safeguardA small glass of brandy in roughly a quart of finished mixture works out well under 5 percent alcohol by volume in the whole, far too dilute to pasteurise anything. The same is true of the sugar and the pineapple acid.
- Long freezer time makes it worseFreezing does not fix it -- freezing does not reduce contamination; anything introduced from the yolks, the shells or the mixing bowl carries through unchanged.
- Pulverized sugarNot granulated. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century books generally mean a finely ground sugar somewhere between today's superfine and confectioners' sugar, fine enough to dissolve in a cold mixture.
- "Let freeze"At the time this meant a hand-cranked pail packed with ice and coarse salt, or in the simplest version an unchurned mixture set in the ice compartment. No churning is specified, so the result would likely have been dense and somewhat icy rather than smooth.
- Shredded pineapple in a canCanned shredded pineapple is now hard to find; crushed pineapple is the nearest surviving equivalent. Period "small" cans were smaller than the standard cans sold today, though no size is stated here.
"Bisque" here has nothing to do with soup: in American ice-cream parlance of the late 1800s a bisque was a frozen cream containing crushed macaroons, cake or nut praline, and the crumbled macaroons in this recipe are closer to a defining ingredient than a garnish. The name is often traced to the biscuit crumbs themselves, though the derivation is not settled. Frozen bisques appear in the ice-cream chapters of household manuals of the period. The "French" label in a book of this kind — a dish a day, one nation at a time — reads as a nod to restaurant cooking and brandy rather than to any particular French provincial tradition. It also comes from a period when domestic ice was cheap and reliable but the bacteriology of eggs was not yet part of the ordinary cook's education, which may be why uncooked yolk desserts sit unremarked in a book like this.