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Burnt Walnut Bisque
2 cups scalded milk Yolks 3 eggs 1 cup sugar 2/3 cup chopped walnut meats 1 cup heavy cream 3/4 tablespoon vanilla Few grains salt Make custard of milk, eggs, one-third of the sugar, and salt. Caramelize remaining sugar, add nut meats, and turn into a slightly buttered pan. Cool, pound, and pass through a puree strainer. Add to custard, cool, then add one cup heavy cream, beaten until stiff, and vanilla. Freeze and mould.
A frozen custard built on a walnut praline that is pounded to powder and stirred back into the base. The praline is the whole dish, so treat the caramel carefully.
- "Bisque" hereIn American cookbooks of this period a bisque is a frozen cream dessert containing pounded nuts or crushed macaroons, not a soup. Expect something close to a walnut ice cream with a fine praline grit.
- The custardTemper the scalded milk into the yolks, then cook over low heat or a water bath to 170-175F, until it coats a spoon. Above about 180F it curdles, and no amount of straining will restore the texture.
- Caramelizing the sugarMelt the remaining two-thirds cup dry in a heavy pan and take it to a deep amber, roughly 340-350F. Stir in the nuts, spread on a buttered sheet, and let it set hard before breaking it up.
- "Pound, and pass through a puree strainer"This means reduce the cooled praline to a powder in a mortar and sieve out the coarse bits. A food processor does it in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, or the nut oil turns the powder into paste.
- Vanilla measureThree-quarters of a tablespoon is 2 1/4 teaspoons. Add it at the end, after the mixture is cold, so the flavor is not driven off.
- "Freeze and mould"Originally churned in a hand-crank freezer, then packed into a mold and buried in ice and salt to firm. An ice cream machine followed by two to three hours in a covered loaf pan or metal mold gives the same result; unmold by dipping the mold briefly in warm water.
- CreamThe recipe calls for the cream beaten until stiff; fold it into the thoroughly chilled custard. Folding into warm custard deflates it and the frozen bisque comes out dense.
- YieldRoughly a quart to a quart and a quarter, serving six to eight. It is rich enough that small portions are appropriate.
Nut bisques belong to the era when ice cream at home meant a pail, a crank, and a great deal of rock salt, and when cooks distinguished carefully between an ice, a sherbet, a mousse, and a bisque. The technique at the center of this one — sugar taken to caramel, poured over nuts, cooled hard, then pounded — is praline, generally traced to French confectionery and long used in Europe and America to give frozen creams both flavor and a faint crunch. The "burnt" in the title refers to the caramel, not to any scorching of the nuts; nineteenth-century recipes routinely called caramel-flavored sweets burnt sugar or burnt almond.