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Biscuit Tortoni in Boxes
1 cup dried macaroons, finely crushed 2 cups thin cream 1/2 cup sugar 1/3 cup sherry 1 pint heavy cream Soak macaroons in thin cream one hour, add sugar, wine, and freeze to a mush; then add heavy cream beaten stiff. Mould, pack in salt and ice, and let stand two hours.
Trim lady fingers, arrange on plate in form of box. Keep in place with ribbon one-half inch wide, and fasten at one corner by tying ribbon in a bow. Garnish opposite corner with flowers of same color as ribbon. Remove ice cream from brick, cut a slice three-fourths inch thick, and place it in box.
A still-frozen macaroon cream, moulded in a brick and served in a constructed box of ladyfingers. The freezing method is the part that needs translating; the assembly is straightforward once the block is hard.
- The hinge: beat the heavy cream in at the mush stageThe base is frozen only to a soft slush before the whipped cream is folded through, which is what keeps the texture light without churning. Fold it in too early and it deflates; too late and the base is a solid block you cannot combine.
- Thin creamLight cream, about 18-20 percent butterfat. Half-and-half is the closest supermarket equivalent and works here, since the pint of heavy cream carries the richness.
- MacaroonsThese are the dry almond macaroons of the amaretti type, not coconut macaroons and certainly not French macaron shells. Buy amaretti, dry them further in a low oven if soft, and crush to fine crumbs.
- Salt and iceThe original assumes a hand freezer packed with roughly three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt. A modern freezer at 0F does the same work: freeze the base in a shallow metal pan, stirring every 20 minutes until slushy, or churn briefly in an ice cream maker.
- "Let stand two hours"This is ripening, not freezing. After moulding, the brick needs a couple of hours undisturbed to firm through before it will cut into clean three-quarter-inch slices.
- The sherryA third of a cup of wine slightly lowers the freezing point, so the mixture stays a little softer than it otherwise would, though the sugar matters more here and the brick still firms enough to slice. Reducing the sherry makes a firmer brick; leaving it out makes a plainer, icier one.
- Moulding for slicesUse a loaf pan or terrine lined with plastic wrap so the brick lifts out whole. The recipe wants square-cut slices, which is why a brick mould rather than a round one matters.
- YieldRoughly a quart and a half of frozen cream once the whipped cream is folded in; depending on the size of the mould, that will give something in the region of eight to twelve slices. Trim and assemble the ladyfinger boxes while the brick ripens, and fill them at the last moment.
Biscuit tortoni is generally traced to the Cafe Tortoni on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris, run in the early nineteenth century by a Neapolitan named Tortoni, and the name stuck to any rich frozen cream flavoured with crushed almond macaroons. "Biscuit" here is usually explained either as a reference to the macaroon crumb or to the biscuit-like moulded shape of the frozen sweet, rather than to any baking; the derivation is not settled. By the time American cookbooks of this period picked it up it had become a standard dinner-party ice, and the elaborate presentation in this version -- a box built of trimmed ladyfingers, tied with half-inch ribbon and garnished with matching flowers -- is characteristic of turn-of-the-century entertaining, where the frozen course was expected to arrive as a small piece of table decoration rather than simply as dessert.