Anna Held
Sketch by Gibbs Mason
COUPE ANN ARBOR
(For one person) One tablespoon chopped French candied chestnuts.
Cover with Jamaica rum.
Cover with one layer of ice cream (vanilla).
Then one layer whole chestnuts, then alternate ice cream and whole chestnuts until the dish is filled.
Cover top with whipped cream and decorate with maraschino cherries and French chestnuts.
An assembly job rather than a cooked dish, and the whole thing stands or falls on the chestnuts and the temperature of the ice cream. Read it as a layering plan, not a set of measurements — the original gives one quantity and leaves the rest to the eye.
- French candied chestnutsThese are marrons glacés — whole chestnuts poached in successively heavier sugar syrups and glazed. Sold in tins or individually foil-wrapped in Italian and French delicatessens around the holidays; broken pieces (brisures) are much cheaper and are exactly what the recipe wants for the chopped tablespoon.
- The coupeA coupe is the footed, wide-bowled glass, and by extension any dessert built in one. A large wine glass or a small trifle glass does the same work. "Until the dish is filled" is literal: the number of layers depends entirely on the glass you use.
- RumJamaica rum here means dark, heavily pot-still rum, the same style still sold. About a tablespoon over the chopped chestnuts, enough to soak but not pool at the bottom of the glass.
- Work coldMarrons glacés are dense with sugar and stay soft when frozen, but the ice cream will not. Chill the glass, have every component ready, and build in under a minute — a coupe assembled slowly slumps into soup before it reaches the table.
- QuantitiesOnly the first tablespoon is specified. For one glass, plan on that tablespoon chopped, four or five whole chestnuts for the layers, two generous scoops of vanilla, and a spoonful of whipped cream on top.
- Maraschino cherriesThe original maraschino cherry was preserved in maraschino liqueur and was dark rather than bright red, though cheaper dyed and brined imitations were already on sale by this period, so it is not certain which was meant. True maraschino-cured cherries, or amarena in syrup, are less flatly sweet than the modern supermarket kind.
- YieldOne serving, as stated. It scales by simple multiplication, and can be built ahead and held in the freezer for an hour if the whipped cream and cherries go on at the last moment.
The named coupe was a fixture of hotel and restaurant dessert menus on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1890s onward — Coupe Jacques, Coupe Saint-Jacques, Coupe Melba — a formula of ice cream, a liqueur, a fruit or confection and whipped cream, given a proper noun and a price. Anna Held's version swaps the usual fruit for marrons glacés, then still an expensive imported luxury sold by the tin, and douses them in dark Jamaica rum; the effect is deliberately costly, which suits a performer whose fame rested largely on Ziegfeld's talent for making extravagance look like news. The "Ann Arbor" of the name is unexplained in the book and no connection to the Michigan city is documented here. Note too that this is a recipe requiring a reliable supply of ice cream and cream, which meant a city, a caterer, or a household with an ice box — the dish is as much a statement about access as about taste.