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Lalla Rookh
Use rule for Philadelphia Ice Cream. When frozen add one cup Jamaica rum. Serve in glasses.
Café Frappé 3 cups coffee 1 cup sugar Freeze to consistency of mush. Serve in frappé glasses with whipped cream on top. 1 cup cream 1 teaspoon salt Orange Frappé 1 cup sugar 2 cups water 1 cup orange juice pulp of four oranges 4 tablespoons lemon juice Boil sugar and water five minutes, add other ingredients, and freeze to a mush. Serve with orange syrup and sprinkle with candied orange peel, finely chopped.
Grape Frappé Substitute one cup grape juice for orange juice, and freeze to a mush.
This page is really four frozen desserts run together by a two-column typesetting; the stray "1 cup cream / 1 teaspoon salt" belongs with the Cafe Frappe above it. Lalla Rookh itself is nothing more than Philadelphia ice cream with rum stirred in at the end.
- The hinge: add the rum lastAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so a cup of rum stirred into an unfrozen custard makes it very hard to set in a churn. Freeze the ice cream hard first, then fold the rum through and serve at once, soft, in glasses. It will stay noticeably soft in the freezer.
- Philadelphia Ice CreamConventionally an uncooked mixture of cream, sugar and vanilla, with no eggs and no cornstarch; consult the book's own rule for the quantities. A cup of rum to a batch of that size is a strong drink, and half as much still tastes of rum.
- "Freeze" means a churnEvery dish here assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, which is why the stray teaspoon of salt in the Cafe Frappe list looks odd. Use an ice cream machine, or freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every 20 to 30 minutes for the frappes.
- Frappe consistency"Mush" is the whole point: a coarse, spoonable slush like a granita, not a smooth sorbet and not a solid block. Serve it the moment it reaches that stage, because it goes stiff within an hour in a modern freezer.
- Cafe Frappe strengthThree cups of coffee to a cup of sugar wants coffee brewed strong, since freezing flattens both aroma and bitterness. Drip coffee at double strength, or two cups of coffee plus a cup of cooled espresso, holds its flavor once frozen.
- Orange Frappe proportions"Pulp of four oranges" means the segments broken up and freed of membrane and seed, added on top of the cup of measured juice. Boiling the sugar and water five minutes gives a light syrup; cool it before adding the juices so the fresh flavor survives.
- Orange syrup and candied peelThe book does not define the serving syrup; sugar boiled with orange juice to a spoon-coating consistency is the obvious reading. Candied peel is sold ready-made, though the coarse cut sold for baking should be chopped fine.
- Grape FrappeThe substitution assumes unfermented bottled grape juice of the Concord type, which was a fashionable temperance ingredient in 1907 and is sweeter than orange juice. Cut the sugar to about two-thirds of a cup and add the lemon juice, or the result is cloying.
- YieldThe Lalla Rookh fills six to eight small glasses; each frappe makes roughly a quart, so serving numbers depend on the size of glass used.
Lalla Rookh took its name from Thomas Moore's enormously popular 1817 verse romance of the same title, set in Mughal India, whose heroine's name is usually glossed as "tulip cheek." Through the middle of the nineteenth century American and English confectioners attached the name to a frozen rum dessert served in a glass, somewhere between an ice cream and a punch, and it turns up on hotel and restaurant menus of the period alongside Roman punch and other spirituous ices, the latter often said to be served between courses rather than at the end of a meal. That is the tradition Lowney's is drawing on, though by 1907 the frozen-dish chapter of a chocolate company's cookbook was aiming at home cooks with a crank freezer, not at hotel chefs, and the two frappes that follow, one built on bottled grape juice, show how comfortably the fashion for iced drinks sat on both sides of the temperance question.