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Sultana Roll
Line sultana roll molds, or one-pound baking powder boxes, with Pistachio Ice Cream. Sprinkle with candied fruit which has been soaked in brandy over night, and fill with Vanilla Ice Cream or with Silver Parfait, or beaten cream sweetened and flavored. Pack in ice and salt four hours. Serve with Claret Sauce.
This is an assembly recipe rather than a cooked one: a lined ice-cream mold, or bombe, built from components given elsewhere in the book. Nearly all the difficulty lies in the lining and the packing.
- The hinge: work with soft, not hard, ice creamThe pistachio layer must be soft enough to spread but firm enough to hold a wall. Ice cream straight from a home freezer will tear the lining; let it stand until it takes a spoon like thick frosting, spread a half-inch shell up the sides of the chilled mold, and refreeze the shell solid before filling.
- Sultana roll moldsA cylindrical tin with a close-fitting cover, of the sort sold for molded ice creams. A one-pound baking powder box was the household substitute — a straight-sided tin roughly 3 inches across and 5 inches tall. Any straight-sided cylinder that can be dipped briefly in warm water to release works; line it with plastic wrap or parchment for a clean turn-out.
- Ice and saltPacking means burying the sealed mold in a bucket of crushed ice mixed with rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, and topping it up as it melts. The salt drives the brine well below freezing. A modern freezer at 0F does the same job unattended; four hours is still about right for a mold this size, and overnight is better.
- Sealing the moldBrine will find any gap. The period trick was to press a strip of butter-smeared paper or plain lard round the seam before burying it. If you are using the freezer this does not matter, but cover the surface directly with plastic wrap to keep ice crystals off.
- The brandied fruitCandied fruit, typically peel, cherries and angelica, chopped small and left in brandy overnight. Drain it well before sprinkling — excess alcohol lowers the freezing point and leaves soft streaks through the finished roll.
- Silver ParfaitA parfait of the 'silver' type, made with egg whites rather than the yolks of a 'golden' one: hot sugar syrup beaten into the whites, then folded with whipped cream. It freezes without churning, which may be why it stands as an alternative to the vanilla ice cream. The third option, sweetened flavored whipped cream, is the simplest and gives the lightest center.
- Claret sauceA period dessert sauce of red wine, sugar and usually a little lemon and cornstarch or currant jelly, generally served cold. 'Claret' in American usage of the period meant red Bordeaux and, loosely, domestic red wines made in that style.
- YieldOne one-pound-box mold gives six to eight slices, cut about three-quarters of an inch thick with a knife dipped in hot water between cuts.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other manufacturer cookbooks of the era it carried a full complement of respectable general recipes alongside the ones that sold chocolate. Its frozen dishes chapter reflects an American middle-class enthusiasm for ice cream that hand-crank freezers and cheap winter-harvested ice had made possible by the 1890s. The sultana roll was a standard of that repertoire. The name is often said to derive from the sultana raisin and, by extension, from the brandied candied fruit scattered through it, though published versions often use mixed candied peel rather than raisins alone. The instruction to use a one-pound baking powder box is a good marker of the book's audience: a household that wanted the effect of a molded restaurant dessert without owning the tinware for it.