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Plombiere
One pint of scalded milk, one pint of cream, one teaspoon of gelatine, one handful of stoned raisins, one ounce of citron, shreds of pineapple preserve, ginger or cherries, four tablespoons of wine, a little extract of almond, whites of four eggs, beaten to a froth, sugar to taste. Freeze as ice cream.-Margaret Sutton Briscoe.
A late-Victorian fruited ice cream of the plombières type, written for a hand-cranked bucket freezer and for a cook who would fold raw beaten whites into a custard base without a second thought.
- Why the cautionThe four egg whites are beaten to a froth and folded in raw, and the mixture then goes straight into the freezer, so nothing in the finished dessert is ever brought to a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Scalding the milk does not help the whites, which are added afterwards; freezing preserves pathogens rather than destroying them. A current frozen-custard recipe, built on a cooked base or pasteurized egg product, should be used instead.
- The gelatineOne teaspoon of unflavoured gelatine in a quart of liquid acts as a stabiliser rather than a setting agent, helping keep the churned mixture from turning grainy. The recipe does not say how it was handled; it would most likely have been softened in a little cold water and dissolved in the hot scalded milk.
- "Wine"The original leaves the choice open. In American recipes of this period the word often meant sherry or Madeira, but nothing here specifies it. Four tablespoons in a quart of base will lower the freezing point a little.
- Citron and preservesCitron here is candied citron peel, sold in blocks and chopped fine; it is still available around the winter holidays. "Shreds of pineapple preserve, ginger or cherries" means candied or preserved fruit cut into slivers, not fresh fruit, which would freeze into ice shards.
- "Sugar to taste"Nothing in the original fixes the sweetness. Ice creams of this period vary widely in how much sugar they take, and the candied fruit and preserves add more on top of whatever is stirred in.
- "Freeze as ice cream"This assumed a bucket freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, cranked until stiff, then repacked to ripen for an hour or two. The recipe does not say when the fruit and wine went in; adding fruit late in the churning helps keep it suspended rather than sinking.
- YieldTwo pints of dairy plus fruit and beaten whites, with the air worked in during churning, comes to perhaps a quart and a half — eight to ten small servings.
Plombières is a French moulded ice cream studded with candied fruit and scented with kirsch or maraschino; the name is generally traced to the spa town of Plombières-les-Bains in the Vosges, though the connection is traditional rather than documented, and the dish is close kin to the bombe. By the time this version was printed the form had been thoroughly domesticated: the almond extract, sherry and chopped citron are the American pantry standing in for kirsch and glacé fruit, and the whole thing is scaled to a family-sized crank freezer rather than a moulded, unmoulded showpiece. The attribution to Margaret Sutton Briscoe, a magazine writer of the 1890s, is typical of the period's household journalism, which collected recipes from contributors by name.