Mix 1 quart of vanilla ice-cream with 1 gill of wine, ¼ pound of Malaga grapes, 2 ounces of candied orange peel, chopped fine, and 1 pint of whipped cream. Then place in the freezer to harden and serve.
July 1 — No. 1
Portuguese
A folded, re-frozen ice cream in the style of a bombe or pudding glacé. Almost all of the work is temperature management: the mixture has to be soft enough to fold and back in the cold fast enough not to turn grainy.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. The wine is unspecified; a fortified sweet wine — Madeira, Port or the Málaga wine the grapes are named for — matches the dish and the period better than a dry table wine.
- Alcohol and freezingThe wine will soften the set somewhat, which is why the original sends it back to harden. Adding much more will make it harder still for the mixture to firm up.
- "Place in the freezer"In the period the freezer is the hand-cranked pail packed with ice and coarse salt, or a mould buried in the same. A modern chest or box freezer does the same job; work the mixture quickly, cover it, and give it four hours or more.
- Malaga grapesLarge sweet white table grapes, seeded in the period by hand. Quarter-pound is about a cup; halve them and remove seeds if present. Firm seedless green grapes are the closest supermarket stand-in, and a scant handful of golden raisins soaked in the wine works if fresh grapes are poor.
- Candied orange peelTwo ounces is about a third of a cup once chopped. Buy peel in slabs rather than the bright diced mixed peel.
- Whipped creamA pint means a pint of liquid cream, whipped — soft peaks, not stiff, or it will not fold into the ice cream without knocking the air out.
- Method in orderSoften the ice cream in the refrigerator until it is spreadable but not melting, stir in the wine, grapes and peel, then fold in the cream in two or three additions. Chill the bowl and the mould first.
- YieldAt least four pints of finished mixture if the pint of cream is measured before whipping. It cuts most cleanly from a loaf tin or a plain mould lined with plastic wrap, dipped briefly in warm water to turn out.
Nineteenth-century menus used the term iced pudding loosely for things frozen in a mould, and this is a simple one: a bought or previously churned vanilla ice cream extended with whipped cream, fruit and wine, the same logic as a French bombe or an Italian semifreddo. The Portuguese label rests mainly on the Málaga grapes and the fortified wine. Books of this kind, which assigned a nation to each day of the year, worked largely by that sort of association rather than by any documented national dish; the geography is decorative, but the technique is sound and the combination of muscat grapes, orange peel and fortified wine is a real one.