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Frozen Desserts: Stir
Stir the ingredients to a smooth paste, whip the cream, beat in the sugar, add the spice, mix with the pudding, and freeze without beating, scraping the frozen mixture from the sides of the can, and stirring smooth.
Serve, when frozen, with cream.
Angel-Cake Glacé. 1 quart cream, Whites 6 eggs, 1¼ cupfuls sugar, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexi can Vanilla, cupful water, cupful finely sifted angel-cake crumbs.
Cook the cream in a farina boiler, add sugar and flavoring, cool, strain, and freeze. Reserve pound sugar and whites 4 eggs. Cook the sugar and water to the same degree required for boiling icing, and pour hot upon the whites beaten to the stiffest possible froth. Stir this icing, with the cake crumbs, gently into the frozen cream. Line the bottom of a mold with slices of angel cake; upon these place a layer of the cream, then cake, so on until the mold is full. !
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Cover tightly, and pack in ice three hours.
Fruit-Cake Glace. 1 pint cream, Yolks 4 eggs, 1 cupful sugar, teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, teaspoonful mixed spices, 2 ounces browned almond paste, 4 macaroons, 2 ounces dried and pounded fruit cake, 1 ounce chocolate, 1 tablespoonful caramel.
Make a custard of the cream, yolks, and sugar; add vanilla, sugar, spices, chocolate, and caramel; freeze, then stir in nuts and crumbs, mold in a cake pan-any ordinary oblong pan, two or two and a half inches deep, freeze in salt and ice. Turn out on platter, cover half an inch with almond paste mixed with little boiled icing. Serve in slices, with soft cus- Card.
Two frozen cake puddings from the era of hand-cranked ice cream freezers, both built on the same idea: freeze a rich cream base, then fold cake or cookie crumbs through it and mold it. The technique still works in a modern machine, with a few translations.
- The farina boilerThat is a double boiler, the vessel used for cooking farina cereal. Cook the cream over simmering water, not direct heat, so it does not scorch or catch a skin.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities have lost their fractions in this printing: the water, the vanilla, the spices and the reserved sugar all read as bare "cupful," "teaspoonful" or "pound." For the angel-cake version, a scant half cup of water to roughly half a pound of sugar is a plausible reconstruction of the syrup; treat the flavorings as one to two teaspoons and taste.
- "The degree required for boiling icing"That is the soft-ball stage, around 238-240F on a candy thermometer. Poured in a thin stream onto stiffly beaten whites and beaten until cool, it makes what is now called Italian meringue; the hot syrup sets and partly cooks the whites, but it should not be relied on to pasteurize them.
- McIlhenny's Mexican VanillaA branded extract of the period, named as such in the book. Any good vanilla extract does the same job; use slightly less if yours is a strong bourbon-vanilla.
- Freezing and packingAn ice-cream machine replaces the crank freezer. Churn the base to soft-serve consistency, fold in the meringue and crumbs by hand, layer into the mold, then ripen it in the freezer for three to four hours rather than packing it in a salt-and-ice bath.
- Almond paste, brownedToast the paste in a dry pan or a low oven until it colors and smells nutty, then crumble it in. Modern marzipan is generally sweeter than period almond paste, so cut the sugar slightly if that is what you have.
- CaramelHere caramel means burnt-sugar syrup used for color and a faint bitterness, not a soft candy. A tablespoon of sugar cooked dark and let down with a little hot water is the intended thing.
- YieldNeither recipe states a mold size or a number of servings. The first uses a quart of cream plus meringue, crumbs and layered cake slices, so it needs a generous mold; the second is built in a shallow oblong pan from a pint of cream. Both are very rich and want small portions with the soft custard sauce.
Glace, in the American cookbook of the 1890s and 1900s, meant a molded frozen dessert rather than a glaze, and these two are examples of a thrifty and fashionable habit at once: turning stale cake into something that could be sent to table in a shaped mold. Angel cake had spread rapidly after the 1880s, when reliable rotary egg beaters and fine-milled flour made a cake of a dozen egg whites practical in a home kitchen, and it left cooks with a standing supply of crumbs and leftover yolks. The fruit-cake version does the same work for the remains of Christmas baking, stretched with macaroons, almond paste and burnt sugar. Both depend on the salt-and-ice packing method, in which a tightly covered mold buried in a mixture of cracked ice and rock salt will hold well below freezing for several hours without any mechanical help, which is how frozen desserts reached the table in households with no refrigeration at all.