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Pistachio Ice Cream
Blanch and peel a quarter of a pound of pistachios, and pound them to a smooth paste with a few drops of rose-water. Beat the yolks of six eggs, and pour over them a pint and a half of boiling milk; add four ounces of powdered sugar, and stir the custard over the fire until it begins to thicken; then pour it out, and when cool stir into it the pounded pistachios and a tea-spoonful of spinach colouring. Pass the whole through a sieve; mould and freeze. If preferred, the pistachio paste can be mixed with cream instead of custard. Time, about a quarter of an hour to boil the custard. Sufficient for a quart of ice cream. Probable cost, 2s.
A straightforward custard-based ice cream whose only awkward parts are the green colouring and the instruction to hold the custard on the fire for a quarter of an hour. Read the timing as an outside limit for the whole operation, not a target.
- Do not let the custard boilSix yolks in a pint and a half of milk thicken at about 175-180F, well below boiling; the "quarter of an hour" in the original is longer than a modern cook on a gas or electric hob will need. Pull it off the heat as soon as it coats the back of a spoon, and strain immediately — the sieve at the end of the recipe will also catch any curds.
- Quantities in modern termsA quarter pound of pistachios is about 113 g (the recipe does not say whether weighed in the shell or out); a pint and a half of milk is 30 fl oz (about 850 ml), as Cassell's uses the imperial pint. Four ounces of powdered sugar is about 113 g of what would now be sold as caster sugar, not icing sugar.
- Blanching the nutsPour boiling water over shelled pistachios, leave two minutes, drain and rub in a cloth; the skins slip off and the colour underneath is far greener. Skins left on give a muddy grey-brown paste.
- Spinach colouringThis is Victorian green vegetable colouring: spinach leaves pounded, the juice pressed out and heated gently until the green solids coagulate, then skimmed off and used as a paste. A teaspoonful is a small amount and contributes little flavour. Any modern natural green colouring, or nothing at all, will serve.
- Rose-waterA few drops only, used as much to keep the pistachios from oiling as to flavour. Modern rose-water varies enormously in strength — start with a few drops as written and taste the finished custard before freezing.
- Pounding the nutsA food processor will do the work of the mortar, but pistachios turn to oily butter quickly. Pulse in short bursts with the rose-water and a spoonful of the cooled custard to keep the paste loose.
- "Mould and freeze"This means freezing the mixture in a pot set in a tub of ice and coarse salt, working it with a spatula as it sets, then packing it into a mould. A modern churn gives a better texture in twenty to thirty minutes; without one, freeze in a shallow tray and beat thoroughly three or four times at half-hour intervals.
- YieldA quart, as stated — roughly a litre, or eight modest servings.
Pistachio ice was a standard of the nineteenth-century confectioner's repertoire, and the pairing of pistachio with rose-water is often traced back to the nut's long use in Persian and Ottoman sweets, from which European cooks are generally said to have borrowed both the flavour and the pale green ideal. The spinach colouring is the telling detail: blanched pistachios are only faintly green, and Victorian ices were judged partly by eye, so cooks are thought to have kept a jar of green vegetable colouring u- u spinach juice heated and skimmed u- u alongside cochineal for red and saffron for yellow. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households running a single cook rather than a professional confectioner, gives the recipe with a probable cost of two shillings, a reminder that ice itself was a purchased commodity, cut from lakes or imported and sold by the ice merchant, and that a quart of pistachio cream was a deliberate piece of expenditure rather than an everyday pudding.