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One Yolk of Egg (Half ounce of Icing Sugar)
One and a half ounce of Icing Sugar.
Half an ounce of Castor Sugar.
Vanilla. Cream the yolk of egg and icing sugar very well together, flavour and stir in the whites of eggs stiffly beaten. Lightly grease the centre of a silver dish; place on it a round of Genoese pastry, and turn the ice cream on to it, and spread the soufflé mixture smoothly over it. Decorate and dredge with castor sugar. Place in a very hot oven until brown. Serve at once.
This is the Victorian and Edwardian dining-room version of what English kitchens called an omelette soufflé surprise and Americans came to call baked Alaska: ice cream on a sponge base, sealed under meringue and browned in a fierce oven. The written quantities are incomplete, so read them as a ratio rather than a recipe.
- The quantities do not add up as printedThe title gives one yolk and half an ounce of icing sugar; the text then calls for one and a half ounces of icing sugar, half an ounce of castor sugar, and an unstated number of whites. Work from the proportion instead: one yolk and about 1.5 oz (40 g) icing sugar creamed together, then stiffly beaten whites folded in. The number of whites is simply not given, so any figure is a guess rather than a fixed rule.
- SugarsIcing sugar is confectioners' or powdered sugar; castor (caster) sugar is superfine granulated. The caster is used only for the final dredging, where its fine grain melts and caramelises quickly under high heat. Granulated will work but browns more unevenly.
- "A very hot oven"Period shorthand for the hottest setting available, roughly 450-500F (230-260C), or under a broiler. The point is to colour the meringue quickly, before the heat reaches the ice cream. A moderate oven will simply melt the whole thing.
- The hinge: everything must be frozen hardThe ice cream should be turned out and refrozen solid on its sponge base, and the meringue applied and baked straight from the freezer. Any exposed edge of ice cream, or any gap where the meringue does not meet the sponge, becomes a leak.
- Genoese pastryG snoise s a whole-egg sponge baked in a shallow tin, cut here into a round slightly wider than the ice cream. It absorbs meltwater and insulates the base. A plain sponge layer or trimmed pound cake serves the same purpose.
- The silver dishA Victorian kitchen sent this to table on the metal dish it was browned on. Use any ovenproof platter that will take 500F; a lightly greased or parchment-lined sheet works if you can lift the finished dessert cleanly.
- Raw egg in the meringueThe interior of the meringue never comes near a pasteurising temperature s that is the whole design. Use pasteurised eggs or pasteurised whites if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised, or make an Italian meringue with hot sugar syrup instead.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe states no yield; as written it is a single dish, and how many it serves depends entirely on the size of the sponge round and the ice cream. "Serve at once" is literal: within a minute or two of leaving the oven, before the meringue weeps and the ice cream slumps.
Desserts that put ice cream in a hot oven appear in European and American cookery from the middle of the nineteenth century, the trick depending on beaten egg white being a poor conductor of heat; the idea is often credited to the physicist Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, though the attribution is traditional rather than firmly documented. By the time this book was written the dish was standard high-class restaurant and country-house work, listed under the French name omelette souffl s surprise or omelette norv sgienne, and its appeal was pure theatre s a cold sweet arriving hot from the range. A recipe like this is only possible in a kitchen with a reliable ice house or, later, a commercial ice supply. The terse, assumption-heavy style here s no oven time, no count of whites, no instruction to freeze the base s suggests a book serving as an aide-m smoire rather than a teacher.