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Biscuit Tortoni
Mix one cup pounded macaroons, two tablespoons sherry, two tablespoons caramelized sugar pounded, with Golden Parfait. Pack in paper boxes, pack boxes in pail, and pack pail in equal parts ice and salt, for four hours. Serve in boxes, sprinkle with brown chopped almonds. Biscuit Glacé Add two tablespoons maraschino, two tablespoons sherry, to Golden Parfait. Fill paper boxes, pack boxes in pail, pack pail in ice and salt, and let stand in ice and salt four hours. 1 cup cream 4 eggs Soufflé Glacé 1 tablespoon grated lemon rind 1 cup sugar ½ cup wine 1 tablespoon lemon juice teaspoon salt Mix yolks of eggs, lemon juice, rind, sugar and salt. Cook until thick. Cool; add beaten whites and cream beaten until stiff. Add wine, fill paper cases, pack cases in pail, and pack pail in ice and salt four hours.
Three variations on one idea: a rich frozen custard packed into paper cases and set in an ice-and-salt bath rather than churned. The third of them, Soufflé Glacé, folds raw beaten egg whites into a mixture that is then only frozen, and that is the reason for the caution above.
- Why the caution appliesIn Soufflé Glacé the yolks are cooked, but the whites of four eggs are beaten and folded in raw, and freezing does not kill Salmonella. Nothing in the method brings the mixture to a safe temperature, and it is then held for hours at a temperature that only suspends bacterial growth. Use a current recipe for a frozen soufflé if you want this dessert.
- The Golden Parfait baseThe first two recipes are useless on their own; they depend on the Golden Parfait recipe printed elsewhere in the book. A parfait base of this kind is usually a cooked yolk-and-syrup mixture folded into whipped cream, so it may not be in the same position as the soufflé -- but check that the version you use is genuinely cooked before freezing it.
- MacaroonsThese are crisp almond macaroons, dried hard and "pounded" to coarse crumbs -- closer to an Italian amaretto biscuit than to a coconut macaroon or a French macaron.
- Caramelized sugar poundedSugar melted to a dark caramel, poured out on an oiled slab, left to set hard, then broken and ground to a powder. It is praline dust without the nuts, and it will weep if the mixture sits before packing.
- Paper boxes and casesPleated paper soufflé cases or small waxed paper cups; the first recipe directs that it be served in the box it froze in. Small ramekins or paper-lined muffin cups do the same job.
- Ice and saltEqual parts crushed ice and coarse rock salt gives a brine bath well below freezing point, cold enough to set a still-frozen dessert in about four hours. A domestic freezer does the same job without the pail, though the texture of an unchurned parfait depends on how well the cream was whipped, not on the method of chilling.
- Ambiguous measurementsThe ingredient list reads "teaspoon salt", apparently with a fraction lost; a pinch to a quarter teaspoon is what is meant. "½ cup wine" is unspecified; the companion recipes on this page use sherry.
- YieldEach of these fills several small paper cases. They are very rich, and the sherry and maraschino cut the cream.
The dessert takes its name from the Café Tortoni on the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris, run in the early nineteenth century by the Neapolitan Giuseppe Tortoni, whose house was famous for ices; the association of his name with a macaroon-flecked frozen cream is traditional rather than traceable to any single documented recipe. "Biscuit" is often said to refer both to the crushed biscuit through the mixture and to the brick-like shape of the little moulds, though this is traditional explanation rather than established etymology. That Lowney's Cook Book, published for a Boston chocolate manufacturer, devotes a whole chapter to frozen dishes says something about the period: ice was a commercial commodity delivered to the door, rock salt was cheap, and a still-frozen dessert packed in paper cases let a household without an ice-cream churn serve something that looked like restaurant work.