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Bisque Ice Cream
3 pints thin cream 1½ cups sugar 1/2 1/2 pound macaroons 1 tablespoon vanilla Soak the macaroons in cream; mash and add to the cream in which the sugar has been dissolved; then add the vanilla and freeze.
An uncooked, eggless ice cream in the Philadelphia style, thickened only by cream and crushed macaroons. The whole success rests on the macaroons: crisp almond ones, softened but not dissolved.
- Thin creamThin cream is roughly today's light cream or half-and-half, about 18-20% fat. Three pints is 6 cups. Using all heavy cream will churn toward butter in a modern machine; a mix of 4 cups heavy and 2 cups whole milk sits about right.
- Which macaroonsIn this period a macaroon is an almond one -- crisp, dry, meringue-based, close to Italian amaretti. Coconut macaroons are a different sweet entirely and will not soften into the base the same way. Half a pound is about 225 g.
- Dissolve the sugar firstStir the sugar into a portion of the cream until no grit remains before combining everything. Sugar that has not dissolved will not do so once the mixture is cold, and the finished cream turns sandy.
- Soaking and mashingGive the macaroons 20-30 minutes in a cup or so of the cream, then mash to a coarse paste. Leave a little texture; fully pureed macaroon reads as sweet mud, while chunks left too large freeze into hard pebbles.
- FreezingWritten for a crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt, which takes 25-40 minutes of turning. In a modern machine, chill the base thoroughly -- at least 4 hours or overnight -- before churning, or it will never set.
- RipeningStraight from the churn this is soft. Pack it into a container and hold it in the freezer an hour or two before serving to firm up.
- VanillaA full tablespoon is generous by current standards; period extracts varied a good deal in strength. Two teaspoons of good extract is closer to the intended effect alongside the almond of the macaroons.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, or 10-12 servings.
"Bisque" here has nothing to do with shellfish soup; in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American ice cream work it denoted a cream enriched with crushed macaroons, ratafias, or sometimes nuts. The name is often linked to the French biscuit, in the sense of a dry baked sweet stirred into a frozen base, though the origin of the word is genuinely disputed and the derivation is traditional rather than documented. Bisque ice creams turn up in confectioners' manuals and household books of the period, usually alongside Philadelphia-style vanilla -- that is, cream frozen without a custard.