Fruit Glacé
Mix together half a cup of chopped nut meats, half a cup of preserved cherries cut fine, a cup of fruit juice and three quarters of a cup of cake crumbs. Beat three cups of cream until it is thick, add the other mixture. Put in a mold and pack in ice and salt to freeze, one part salt to two of ice; freeze about four hours.
A still-frozen cream mousse of the kind that predates the home freezer compartment — no churning, no custard, no cooking at all. Two things decide whether it works: how stiffly the cream is beaten and how cold the packing gets.
- Beat the cream properly, then fold"Thick" here means stiff enough to hold a soft peak, not merely thickened. Fold the fruit and crumb mixture in with a spatula rather than beating it in, or the air you just whipped in collapses and the result freezes into a solid brick.'
- The freezing methodOne part rock salt to two parts crushed ice, measured by volume, packed around a metal mold set in a bucket. The salt drops the brine well below 32F, which is what makes the mixture freeze without a churn. Table salt will work but dissolves too fast; use coarse or ice-cream salt, and drain and repack the brine as the ice melts over four hours.
- A modern freezer works, but not the same wayA home freezer at 0F will set this in four to six hours in a loaf pan covered with plastic pressed to the surface. Because nothing is churning, expect a denser, slightly icier texture than the ice-and-salt method gives. Stirring it once at the ninety-minute mark helps.
- No sugar is listedAll the sweetness comes from the preserved cherries and the "fruit juice," which may well have meant the syrup drained from canned or preserved fruit rather than fresh juice. If you are using unsweetened juice, the dessert will be less sweet and will freeze harder; two to three tablespoons of sugar dissolved into the juice first would bring it closer.
- Cake crumbsDry, fine crumbs from a plain butter or sponge cake — stale cake, grated. They soften into the cream and give body. Fresh moist cake will clump; dry the crumbs briefly in a low oven if yours are soft.
- UnmoldingDip the mold in warm water for five to ten seconds, run a thin knife around the edge, and invert onto a chilled plate. Let it stand a few minutes at room temperature before serving; straight from the brine it is too hard to spoon.
- YieldThree cups of cream whipped roughly doubles in volume, and the nuts, cherries, juice and crumbs add close to another three cups, so the finished glace runs to something over half a gallon.
"Glace" is simply the French for frozen or iced, and in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it appears on still-frozen desserts: whipped cream lightened with fruit and crumbs, packed in a mold, buried in ice and salt, and left to set without churning. They were the practical answer to a kitchen with no mechanical refrigeration -- a mousse or a parfait needs no crank and no attention, only a supply of ice, which many households bought by the block from an iceman.