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Bisque of Preserved Ginger
1/4 pound of either preserved or candied ginger. 1/2 cup sugar. Juice of one lemon. 4 cups of cream.
Cut the candied ginger into very small pieces. Make a hot syrup of the sugar with a few spoonfuls of water and squeeze the lemon into it, then put in the ginger and let it soften and impart the flavor to the syrup. Put the cream and ginger and syrup all together, freeze and beat up.
A four-ingredient frozen cream that depends almost entirely on the quality of the ginger and on chilling everything before it goes into the machine. The method is written for a hand-crank freezer, so the final "beat up" needs translating.
- Chill the base firstThe syrup is made hot and the cream is added directly to it, which is fine for a salt-and-ice freezer that will take twenty minutes to reach temperature. In a modern machine the base must be refrigerated to at least 40F, ideally overnight, or the frozen bowl will thaw before the mixture sets. The overnight rest also lets the ginger flavour spread through the cream.
- "Freeze and beat up"This means churning: constant agitation while freezing, then a vigorous beating to lighten the finished cream before it hardens. In an ice cream machine, churn until it holds a soft ribbon, then transfer to a chilled container and freeze another two to three hours. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and beat hard with a whisk or in a food processor every 40 minutes until set, four or five rounds.
- Preserved versus candied gingerPreserved ginger is stem ginger packed in heavy syrup, sold in jars; candied ginger is the same root dried and rolled in sugar. Both work, but candied is drier and firmer, so give it longer in the hot syrup to soften. If you use preserved ginger from a jar, drain it and cut the sugar to about a third of a cup, since the packing syrup is already sweet.
- Cutting the ginger"Very small pieces" means small enough not to freeze into hard nuggets. Aim for pieces no larger than a lentil. The recipe directs cutting the ginger before it goes into the syrup; chopping it after it has softened is a departure from the original, though easier on the knife and on the fibres.
- The creamCream at this period was not standardised; depending on how it was separated, "cream" could run anywhere from about 18 percent fat to close to 40. Heavy cream alone gives a very rich result by modern palates; three cups heavy cream to one cup whole milk churns well.
- Lemon and curdlingThe lemon juice goes into the sugar syrup, not the cream. Acid added straight to cold cream can curdle it, though high-fat cream is fairly tolerant of a single lemon's juice in four cups; diluting it in the syrup first removes the risk. Cool the syrup somewhat before it meets the cream all the same.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half, serving six to eight. It hardens firm because there is no egg and little air, so let it stand ten minutes at room temperature before scooping.
In American confectioners' usage around 1900 a bisque was not a soup but a frozen cream carrying something crushed or chopped through it, usually macaroon crumbs, almonds, or as here a candied fruit or root. Books of the period list bisque glacé alongside mousses, parfaits and biscuits as one of the standard forms a caterer was expected to produce. Preserved ginger was an appropriate luxury for it: stem ginger in syrup came almost entirely from Canton and arrived in the distinctive glazed stoneware jars that turn up in American households of the era long after the ginger was eaten. Its combination of heat and sweetness made it a favourite for iced desserts, where cold blunts flavour and a strongly aromatic ingredient earns its place.