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Angel Stars
Cook one cup of sugar and half a cup of water, pour this slowly into the whites of five eggs beaten stiff, beat until cold, add one quart of cream whipped. Flavor with vanilla and almond, pour into star shaped individual molds, pack and freeze. When serving sprinkle profusely with granulated sugar.-Linda Hull Larned.
This is an Italian-meringue mousse frozen in molds rather than a churned ice cream, so no machine is needed. The hinge is the sugar syrup: it must be hot and concentrated enough to set the whites, or the whole thing collapses into sweet foam.
- Cook the syrup to soft ballThe recipe says only "cook one cup of sugar and half a cup of water," with no stage or temperature given. For a meringue that will set, soft ball (238-242F on a thermometer) is the usual target: much below that the meringue stays slack and weeps in the freezer; taken well past it, the syrup strings and sets into threads as it hits the whites.
- Pour in a thin streamWith a stand mixer running at medium, trickle the syrup down the side of the bowl onto the whites rather than into the whisk. Then beat until the bowl is cool to the hand, usually 8-10 minutes; folding warm meringue into whipped cream deflates both.
- Egg whitesFive whites is about 5 fl oz. The hot syrup raises their temperature but does not reliably pasteurize them, and the dessert is never cooked afterward. Use pasteurized whites if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
- A quart of creamFour cups of heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks only. Stiffly whipped cream will not fold smoothly into meringue and leaves buttery streaks after freezing.
- Flavoring amountsNone are given. About 2 teaspoons vanilla extract and a scant 1/4 teaspoon almond extract suits this volume; almond extract dominates quickly, so add it last and taste the mixture before molding.
- "Pack and freeze"In this period this meant burying the sealed molds in a tub of cracked ice and coarse salt, a matter of a few hours. A home freezer does the same job: fill the molds, cover the surface with plastic wrap, and freeze at least 6 hours or overnight. No stirring is required, as the meringue and cream keep the texture light.
- Molds and unmoldingStar-shaped individual molds hold roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup each. A quart of cream whipped, plus the meringue, makes a large quantity of mixture, so expect well over a dozen small servings; measure your own molds rather than trusting a fixed count. Dip each mold briefly in warm water and let the dessert stand 5 minutes before turning out, or the points of the star will break off.
- The sugar at the tableThe granulated sugar sprinkled "profusely" at serving is presumably as much for glitter as for sweetness. Add it just before the plates leave the kitchen; on a cold surface it will dampen and lose its sparkle.
Linda Hull Larned was a prolific turn-of-the-century American cookery writer, author of The Hostess of To-day, and a writer of menus and recipes in the magazine style of the day; her recipes tend to assume a household with molds and a supply of ice. Frozen mousses of this kind, built on Italian meringue and whipped cream and set without churning, were a fashionable alternative to hand-cranked ice cream in the 1890s and 1900s: they held a shape sharply, which mattered when the dessert course was expected to arrive as a star, a pyramid or a bunch of grapes from a hinged pewter or tin mold. Because they were frozen by burying the molds in salted ice rather than stirred over a paddle, they left the cook free to do something else. The final sprinkle of granulated sugar belongs to the same visual logic as the mold itself.