Home › The Principles of Cookery › Ratafia Ice-Cream
Ratafia Ice-Cream
Beat the yolk of an egg, and stir into it half a pint of cream and half a cupful of new milk. Sweeten, and put the liquid into a saucepan over a gentle fire with an ounce of ratafias. Stir until it begins to thicken, pour it out, and when cool add the strained juice of half a lemon. Freeze the preparation in the usual way, and when it is set, add a glassful of noyeau, maraschino, or Curacoa, and another ounce of crushed ratafias. Time, about ten minutes to thicken the custard. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for one pint of ice-cream.
A small-batch almond custard ice, spiked with liqueur after churning. The quantities are Imperial and the biscuits are the whole point of the flavour.
- RatafiasThese are tiny, hard almond macaroons, about the size of a shilling, sold in Victorian confectioners by weight. Italian amaretti are the closest thing on a modern shelf; use the crisp, dry kind rather than the soft chewy ones. An ounce is a small handful, though the count varies with the size of the biscuit.
- Imperial measuresAn Imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. The "half a cupful of new milk" is loose but works out near 4 fl oz. "New milk" simply means fresh whole milk, not skimmed or long-kept.
- The custard is the hingeOne yolk to 10 oz of cream is a very light bind, and it will never look properly thick. Cook over a gentle heat, stirring constantly, and pull it off the moment it coats the spoon; if you use a thermometer, somewhere around 175-180F is the usual mark. "Ten minutes to thicken" assumes a low fire and a heavy pan.
- Lemon juice goes in coldThe acid is added after cooling for good reason: stirred into a warm custard it will make the milk solids seize. Strain it, as directed, or the pulp will freeze into hard flecks.
- Liqueurs"Noyeau" is noyau, a kernel-flavoured almond liqueur (crème de noyaux today); "Curacoa" is curaçao, the orange one. A Victorian liqueur glass held something in the region of 1 fl oz.
- Why the spirit comes lastAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so it is folded in once the mixture is already set rather than churned from the start. Fold quickly and return it to the freezer to firm up, or the texture slackens.
- Freezing "in the usual way"For a Victorian household that meant a pail churn packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, turned by hand until set. A domestic ice-cream maker does the same job; without one, freeze in a shallow tray and beat it smooth two or three times as it sets.
- YieldOne pint, as the recipe states, which is two generous servings or three modest ones. The second ounce of crushed ratafias is stirred through at the end and will soften as it sits.
Ratafia did double duty in the nineteenth-century kitchen: it named both a sweetened liqueur flavoured with fruit kernels and the little almond biscuits made to accompany it, and Cassell's calls here for the biscuits while naming the liqueur separately as "noyeau," which belongs to the same kernel-flavoured family. The name is generally traced to the practice of drinking a cordial to ratify an agreement, though that etymology is traditional rather than settled. Recipes of this sort frozen in a salt-and-ice churn and finished with a glass of liqueur at table belong to the period when ice was reliably available to middle-class British households through the imported ice trade, which is why a book like this can print a costing (1s. 3d.) and assume the reader knows what "the usual way" of freezing means without a word of explanation.