Bisque
Make one-half gallon rich boiled custard, allowing six eggs to each quart. Add, before taking it from the fire, two pounds of macaroon almonds. When cold, freeze.--Mrs. A. P.
A frozen custard in the old sense of "bisque" — an ice cream carrying crushed macaroons or almonds. The original assumes you already know the book's boiled custard and its churn, so most of the work is filling in what it leaves out.
- Do not let the custard boil"Rich boiled custard" means a stirred custard cooked over gentle heat or a double boiler until it coats a spoon, around 170-180F. Actual boiling with twelve eggs in it will scramble the base past saving.
- The egg countSix eggs to the quart across half a gallon is twelve eggs, a very rich base by modern standards. Period eggs were probably smaller on average than today's large eggs, so ten modern eggs may be closer to the intent.
- Sugar and flavouring are missingThe recipe presumes the boiled custard recipe printed elsewhere in the book, which would have supplied its own sugar and flavouring. Count on roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar per quart of milk or cream, plus vanilla, or the finished ice will taste flat.
- "Macaroon almonds"Most likely almond macaroons, the crisp egg-white-and-almond biscuits, rather than a variety of nut, since pounded macaroons are what period bisque ice creams normally carried. Two pounds to half a gallon is a great deal; one pound, dried out in a low oven and crushed coarse, gives texture without turning the ice to paste.
- Add them cold, not on the fireStirring macaroons into hot custard as directed dissolves them into the base. If you want distinct crumbs, fold half in before churning and the rest during the last minute.
- Freezing"Freeze" means a hand-crank churn packed with ice and rock salt; ratios varied, commonly somewhere between one part salt to three and one part salt to eight of ice. A modern machine does the same job; chill the base thoroughly overnight first, then ripen the churned ice in the freezer for a few hours.
- YieldHalf a gallon of base plus the macaroons makes something over two and a half quarts churned — enough for sixteen. Halving the whole thing is sensible for a home machine.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, is full of these initialed, telegraphic entries: a cook writing for other cooks who already owned the basic custard and did not need it repeated. "Bisque" in nineteenth-century American ice cream language had nothing to do with shellfish soup; it meant a frozen custard studded with pounded macaroons, almonds or ratafias, and bisque ice cream appears under that name in numerous confectioners' books of the period. The word is often said to share a root with biscuit, though that derivation is folk tradition rather than settled etymology, and in any case the macaroon is the point of the dish. Ice cream at this date meant a household with an ice house or access to ice delivery, the latter common enough by 1879 that a recipe calling for half a gallon of twelve-egg custard to be frozen tells us less about the table it was served at than one might assume.