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Macaroon Bisque
2 cups sifted macaroon crumbs. 6 tablespoons powdered sugar. 1 cup candied cherries cut fine. 1 teaspoon granulated gelatin. 1/4 cup sherry. 1 cup orange juice. 1 pint whipped cream.
Place sifted macaroon crumbs and the cherries in a bowl, add sherry and orange juice, let stand over night, dissolve gelatin in a little cream and add it with the sugar to the crumbs. Beat cream very stiff and slowly add the other mixture. Put in mold, pack in ice and salt, let stand several hours. Decorate with macaroons and serve.
A still-frozen cream — no churning, no custard base — set in a mold buried in ice and salt. The whole thing depends on the crumbs being soaked soft the night before and the cream being whipped stiff enough to carry them.
- What kind of macaroonIn this period a macaroon usually meant a crisp almond cookie, closer to an Italian amaretto than to the chewy coconut mounds sold under the name now, though coconut versions were also known. Dry, crisp almond macaroons crush to a fine sandy crumb and soak up the liquid; coconut macaroons stay stringy and sweeten the dessert past the point of pleasure.
- Crumb quantityTwo cups of sifted crumbs is roughly 5 to 6 oz of cookies, depending on how dry they are. Sift after crushing and discard the coarse bits, or the frozen bisque will be gritty.
- The overnight soak is the hingeA cup of orange juice plus a quarter cup of sherry into dry crumbs looks like too much liquid at first. Left covered overnight in the refrigerator it becomes a thick paste, and that paste is what gives the dessert its texture. Rushing it leaves hard flecks that freeze into pebbles.
- GelatinOne teaspoon of granulated gelatin is just under half a modern 1/4-oz envelope (about 2 1/4 teaspoons). "Dissolve in a little cream" will not actually dissolve it cold: sprinkle it over a couple of tablespoons of cream, let it stand five minutes, then warm gently until clear and stir it in while still fluid, or it will set in threads.
- Powdered sugarPeriod powdered sugar was simply finely ground cane sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which is harmless here and helps stabilize the cream.
- A pint of whipped creamRead this as a pint of heavy cream measured before whipping. That gives about a quart of whipped volume and a total yield near two quarts.
- Ice and salt, or the freezerThe original says only to pack the mold in ice and salt and let it stand several hours; the usual still-freezing proportion of the period was around three parts crushed ice to one part coarse salt. A modern freezer does the same work: cover the mold tightly and freeze four hours or overnight. Because there is no churning, the result is dense rather than light.
- ServingServes 8 to 10. Unmold by dipping the mold briefly in warm water, then let the bisque stand 10 to 15 minutes before slicing; straight from the freezer it is too hard to cut cleanly.
"Bisque" in early twentieth-century American frozen-dessert vocabulary had nothing to do with soup: it named a frozen cream containing crushed macaroons, nut brittle or stale cake crumbs, and appears under that heading in confectioners' manuals and household cookbooks from the 1890s onward. The origin of the name is uncertain: it is often said to come from the crumbly, grainy body the crumbs give the mixture, though a derivation from "biscuit," as in biscuit glacé, is at least as likely. This is a still-frozen dessert, made without a crank freezer — for a household that could get ice but not necessarily an ice-cream churn — and the sherry and candied cherries mark it as a company dish rather than an everyday one. Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and her New Cook Book is full of this kind of economical elegance, where day-old cookies and a little gelatin stand in for a cooked custard base.