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Biscuit
1 pint of sweet cream, 24 macaroons, 2/3 cup pulverized sugar; whip the cream to its utmost consistency, then add the macaroons (pulverized), then the sugar; put in a pail, cover tight, and freeze without any stirring. Prepare this at noon and it will be ready for tea. Delicious, "Tried and tested."
This is a still-frozen cream — what French kitchens call a biscuit glacé and Italian ones biscuit tortoni. The whipped cream does all the work an ice-cream churn would otherwise do, so the one thing not to do is stir it.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" means fresh and unsoured, as opposed to soured cream. Use 2 cups of heavy or whipping cream; the higher the butterfat, the more air it will hold and the smoother it freezes.
- Whip to "its utmost consistency"Take it to stiff peaks but stop before it turns grainy and begins to break toward butter. The trapped air is the only thing standing between this and a solid block of frozen cream.
- MacaroonsMost likely the crisp almond macaroon of the amaretti type rather than the French sandwich cookie; the recipe does not say. Twenty-four small ones crush down to roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of crumbs; crush them fine and fold gently so the cream does not deflate.
- Pulverized sugarSuperfine (caster) sugar, or confectioners' sugar if that is what is at hand. Two-thirds cup is generous alongside already-sweet macaroons, and the mixture can be tasted and cut back before freezing.
- "Put in a pail"Still-freezing of this kind was normally done by setting the covered pail in ice and coarse salt, though the recipe does not say so. A loaf pan or covered container in the freezer does the same job; press plastic wrap onto the surface before the lid to keep ice crystals off the top.
- Freeze without any stirringThis is the hinge of the recipe. Churning would collapse the whipped structure; left alone, the mixture sets as a semifreddo with a dense, sliceable texture.
- Noon to teaAbout five to six hours in a home freezer. Check at four hours — if it has gone rock hard, let it stand 10 minutes before slicing.
- YieldA pint of cream whipped roughly doubles in volume; expect six modest servings. Biscuits glacés were often frozen in small paper cases and served one apiece, though this version calls simply for a pail.
The single-word title Biscuit is short for biscuit glacé, a nineteenth-century frozen sweet usually explained as taking its name from its shape rather than any baking: the mixture was set in small square or oblong paper cases, so it came to the table looking like a biscuit. Its close relative, biscuit tortoni, is generally traced to the café keeper Tortoni, said to have been Neapolitan, who ran a celebrated establishment in Paris in the early 1800s, and the almond-macaroon crumb remained its signature. Recipes of this kind appear in American household books, which often note that they need no ice-cream freezer or turning — useful when churning meant sustained arm work and a supply of block ice. The closing tag, "Tried and tested," suggests a contributed recipe, the sort of thing collected from a neighbor or a church committee and vouched for by whoever sent it in.