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Frozen Desserts: Yolks
Frozen Orange Soufflé. 1 quart cream, 1 pint orange juice, Yolks 6 eggs, 2 cupfuls sugar, box gelatin.
Cover the gelatin with cupful cold water, and soak an hour, then dissolve in cupful boiling water. Mix the orange juice and the sugar together. Whip the cream. Beat the yolks until light, add them to the orange juice and sugar; add the gelatin, strain, and freeze. When frozen, • MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK remove dasher, stir in the whipped cream, and stand two hours to ripen.
Frozen Strawberry Soufflé 1 pint strawberry juice 1½ cupfuls sugar, box gelatin, cupful cold water Yolks 6 eggs, 1 quart cream.
Mix the strawberry juice and sugar until they form a sirup. Cover the gelatin with cold water, and soak half an hour, then add a cupful boiling water, and stir until dissolved. Beat the yolks of eggs, add them to the sirup, also the gelatin, and freeze.
When frozen, stir in lightly the cream whipped to a stiff froth; repack Frozen Pudding. 1 quart milk, 20 large raisins, Yolks 4 eggs, 1 cupful sugar, 2 ounces citron, 2 ounces almonds, 1 tablespoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla. 1 ounce preserved ginger.
Put the milk and raisins in a double boiler and cook twenty minutes. Beat the yolks and sugar together, add to the hot milk, cook one minute, and strain. When cold, add the citron chopped fine, the almonds blanched and grated, the vanilla and ginger cut into small pieces; freeze Orange Mousse. 6 oranges, 1 pint cream, 1½ cupfuls sugars 1 candied orange.
Squeeze orange juice into a saucepan with the sugar; add the rind of 1 orange, cut in pieces and 2 tablespoonfuls water. Place over the fire, stir with a wooden spoon until melted, strain, cool, and freeze. When frozen, remove dasher and add 1 pint cream whipped stiff, also the candied orange cut into small pieces. Pack to ice and salt for an hour and a half.
Garnish with small pieces candied orange cut in thin strips, alternating with angelica cut in the same fashion.
Finish with a row of sliced oranges cut in halves and lapping over each other.
Tutti-Frutti. 2 cupfuls milk, Yolks 5 eggs, 2 cupfuls thin cream. cupful sugar, teaspoonful salt, 1½ tablespoonfuls Mellbenny's Mexican Vanilla, 1½ cupfuls fruit cut in small pieces.
Make a custard of first 4 ingredients, strain, and cool. Add the cream and flavoring, then freeze to the consistency of mush, add the fruit, and continue freezing. Mold, pack in salt and ice, and let stand two hours. Candied cherries, pineapple, figs, sultana raisins, and citron may be used.
Pineapple Mousse. 1 teaspoonful gelatin. 1 pint double cream, 1 cupful scalded pineapple juice, cupful sugar, Juice lemon.
Soften the gelatin in 3 tablespoonfuls cold water five minutes and dissolve in the hot pineapple juice; add the sugar and let cool, then add the lemon juice and the cream; beat the mixture with an egg beater until thick. Turn into a chilled mold; press the cover down over wrapping paper, and let stand packed in equal measures of ice and salt three or four hours. Turn from the mold and surround with half slices pineapple sugared or dressed with cold sugar sirup.
Six frozen desserts sharing a page, all built for a hand-cranked ice cream freezer packed with ice and rock salt. Two of them — the orange and strawberry soufflés — fold raw, uncooked egg yolks into a mixture that is only ever frozen, and those two should not be made from this text at all.
- Why the soufflés failIn both the orange and the strawberry soufflé the yolks of six eggs are beaten and added to juice, sugar and gelatin, then frozen. The only heat anywhere in either method is the cupful of boiling water used to dissolve the gelatin, which is nowhere near enough to pasteurise the yolks, and the mixture is then held cold for hours. Freezing is not a kill step. Use a current recipe if you want a frozen egg soufflé.
- The cooked custards are a different caseThe Frozen Pudding and the Tutti-Frutti both cook the yolks into hot milk before chilling, which is the standard custard route. "Cook one minute" is vague; a stirred custard is done at 170-175F on an instant-read thermometer, when it coats the back of a spoon.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities on this page appear to have lost their fractions in printing: "cupful cold water," "cupful sugar" and "cupful scalded pineapple juice" read as whole units where a half or quarter may have been meant. "Box gelatin" was itself a standard period unit of purchase rather than a fraction, though period recipes more often specify a half box. Treat the gelatin and sugar amounts here as unreliable rather than guessing.
- A box of gelatinAround 1900 a box of granulated gelatin held somewhere in the region of half an ounce to an ounce — very roughly two to four of today's ¼-oz envelopes — and sources disagree, so the figure should not be relied on. Either way it is more than a modern frozen dessert of this size needs; gelatin in hand-frozen mixtures is generally understood to have helped the texture, though these recipes do not say so.
- Double creamThe pineapple mousse calls for double cream, meaning cream rich enough to whip — modern heavy or whipping cream at 36 percent or more. Standard "thin cream" in the Tutti-Frutti is closer to today's light cream or half-and-half.
- Ripening and packing"Repack" and "stand two hours to ripen" mean burying the sealed canister in crushed ice and rock salt to firm and mellow; this page specifies equal measures of ice and salt for the pineapple mousse, and other period sources use less salt than that. A modern substitute is the back of a home freezer for two to three hours; the texture will be firmer and less silky than salt-ice ripening gave.
- Pineapple and gelatinFresh pineapple juice contains bromelain, which breaks down gelatin. Scalding the juice, as the mousse directs, deactivates it — do not skip that step or substitute unheated fresh juice.
- YieldThe soufflé formulas each add up to roughly 2½ quarts of mixture; the mousses and Tutti-Frutti to something like 1½ quarts, perhaps eight to ten servings. These are estimates from the ingredient lists, not figures the book gives.
History: Frozen "soufflés" and mousses of this kind belong to a fashion for gelatin-stabilised frozen confections that ran alongside the plain custard freezer in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening ones of the twentieth. The name soufflé here has nothing to do with baking: it is often said to borrow the word for the lightness gained by folding whipped cream into the mixture, though the page itself gives no rule about how such sweets were frozen — both the orange soufflé and the orange mousse call for removing the dasher. The heavy use of candied fruit, citron, preserved ginger and angelica in the Tutti-Frutti and the orange mousse suits a period when such sweetmeats signalled an expensive dessert. The branded vanilla named twice on this page is a reminder of another habit of the era: household compilations often carried proprietary flavouring extracts by name, whether by arrangement with the maker or simply because that was what the contributing cook kept in her cupboard — which of the two applies here is not something the page tells us.