Home › Recipes › Curacoa and Maraschino Ice Creams
Curacoa and Maraschino Ice Creams
For combinations with strawberry and pineapple ices. Use a cupful of curacoa to 3 quarts of cream or custard. Color the cream cafe-au-lait with 2 ounces of sugar burnt to the color of golden syrup and then dissolved in milk. Beat the ice cream to make it gold color. Use the same proportion of maraschino in pure cream and beat the ice cream to whiteness,
This is a flavoring and coloring formula rather than a full ice cream recipe: it assumes you already have a cream or custard base ready for the freezer. Two things govern the result — how much alcohol goes in, and how much air you beat out of the mixture.
- Scale it downThree quarts of base is professional volume. A cupful to 3 quarts works out at roughly 1 part liqueur to 12 parts base, so for a home batch of 1 quart that is a little over 5 tablespoons of curaçao or maraschino.
- Alcohol and freezingLiqueur depresses the freezing point, so these mixtures set softer and slower than a plain custard. Adding more than the stated proportion will make it harder still to firm up, particularly in a domestic machine.
- The burnt sugar coloringTwo ounces of sugar taken to the shade of golden syrup is caramel, and it is doing color work, not flavor work. Melt it dry or with a spoonful of water, pull it off the heat while it is still amber, then dissolve it in a little warm milk before stirring it in; taken past dark brown it turns bitter and will read as scorched.
- "Cafe-au-lait" and "gold color"These are the period's shorthand for shade, not for coffee flavor. The caramel tints the base pale tan; beating incorporates air, which lightens it to gold. For the maraschino version you add no color at all and beat until it reads white.
- Beating means overrunThe hinge of the recipe. Both versions depend on churning air into the base while it freezes — a hand-crank or modern machine run to a thick, matte, ribbon-holding consistency. Underbeaten, the curaçao version looks muddy brown rather than gold and the maraschino version looks ivory rather than white.
- MaraschinoMeant here is the dry, clear cherry-kernel liqueur from Dalmatia, not the sugary red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Substituting the latter will ruin both the color and the balance.
- CuraçaoAny decent orange curaçao works. Avoid the bright blue bottling, which will fight the caramel and give a greenish cast.
- How it was servedThe opening line is the point of the whole entry: these creams were meant for combinations with strawberry and pineapple ices, presumably in layered bombes and coupes where colours were contrasted. Served alone, each is a light liqueur ice cream.
The American Pastry Cook, generally attributed to the Chicago hotel writer Jessup Whitehead, belongs to the late-nineteenth-century trade literature written for men working hotel and restaurant pastry rooms, which is why the base quantity is three quarts and why the instruction concerns color rather than method — the reader was assumed to know how to freeze a custard. Both liqueurs named were fashionable imports of the period: curaçao, flavored with the dried peel of the bitter laraha orange grown on the Dutch Caribbean island of that name, and maraschino, distilled from marasca cherries and their crushed stones around Zadar on the Dalmatian coast. Their appearance in a pastry manual reflects the era's taste for elaborate composed ices, in which a bombe or coupe was assembled from contrasting colors.