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Biscuit Tortoni
1 cup ground macaroons 1 cup thin cream 2/3 cup sugar 1/2 cup sherry 2 cups cream, whipped 1 cup blanched almonds, minced Soak the macaroons in the thin cream about forty-five minutes. Add sugar and sherry and freeze until mushy in pan of refrigerator. Brown almonds in oven and mince. Add whipped cream to the frozen mixture and pack in individual paper cases. Sprinkle almonds over top and freeze in refrigerator for five hours. Serves eight.
A still-frozen dessert from the era when a home refrigerator's freezing compartment was a novelty worth building menus around. Nothing here is churned, so the whipped cream and the alcohol are what keep it from setting into a brick.
- Thin creamThin cream is light or coffee cream, roughly 18-20% fat. The 2 cups of "cream, whipped" almost certainly means heavy cream, measured before whipping.
- The macaroonsThese are crisp almond macaroons of the amaretti type, not coconut macaroons and not the sandwiched French macaron. Buy them dry and hard; soft ones turn to paste in the cream instead of swelling.
- Freezing compartment vs. freezerA 1930s refrigerator's freezing compartment ran considerably warmer than a modern freezer. A modern freezer at 0F will take the mixture past "mushy" quickly, so check at 20-minute intervals and stir the edges in. The final five-hour set will be firmer than intended.
- Why it stays scoopableThe half cup of sherry depresses the freezing point, which is what keeps an unchurned mixture from freezing hard. Reducing or omitting it gives a noticeably icier result rather than a lighter one.
- Toasting the almondsTen to twelve minutes at 350F, shaken once, until they smell nutty and are pale gold. Cool them completely before mincing or they will oil up and clump on top of the dessert.
- Folding, not stirringFold the whipped cream into the semi-frozen base with a spatula in as few strokes as will combine them. Beating it in collapses the air that stands in for churning.
- Paper casesFluted paper souffle cups or foil muffin liners set in a muffin tin work; the recipe specifies only "individual paper cases." Eight portions, and they are rich enough that eight is right.
- ServingLet them stand five to ten minutes out of a modern freezer before serving so the sherry and almond come forward.
Biscuit tortoni takes its name from Tortoni, the Italian proprietor of a celebrated Paris cafe on the Boulevard des Italiens in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whose house was known for frozen desserts; the attribution is traditional rather than documented in any recipe of his own hand. "Biscuit" here is generally taken to refer to the form -- a frozen cream set in a small case rather than churned in a freezer -- and crushed macaroon appears in most versions. Its appearance in a refrigerator-menu book is telling: the dish had long been a restaurant and confectioner's item requiring ice and salt, and mechanical refrigeration in the home put it within reach of a cook with a freezing compartment and five hours to spare.