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Saratoga Ice Cups
For the following very easy method of serving ices ornamentally there should be provided a sufficient number of tin drinking cups made like tall tumbler glasses, to serve as molds. They need have no rimmed edge. Their slight flexibility makes them better that glasses to get the shell of ice out of. The commonest thin tumblers will answer how ever.
Take 4 dozen tumblers and set them in a freezing mixture of ice pounded extremely fine and well mixed with salt and a little brine from the freezing tub. The freezing mixture may be in a common washtub, or wooden box, and no deeper than the tumblers. Fill the glasses with thin strawberry, pineapple or lemon syrup, or with any of the preparations for fruit ices. Cover over the top of the tub with a table cloth and leave them to freeze. In from 15 to 30 minutes the glasses or moulds will have a coating of ice inside perhaps an eighth-of-an-inch thick. The unfrozen syrup should then be poured out and the glasses returned to the freezing mixture for the inside coating of ice to freeze perfectly dry and crystalized. The freezing may be hastened by gently stirring the freezing mixture among the tumblers with a stick and by turning the tumblers with the fingers.
When it is time to serve wipe the outside of the glass or mold with a cloth dipped in tepid water and turn out the shell of ice. Fill it with a curacao or caramel or nut ice cream or any other of different color from the cup itself, or with a pure frothed cream sweetened and flavored and frozen in the same ice cup set in a sorbetiere Different colored cups may be made with the green syrup of pounded muscatel grapes, with Concord grapes, cherries, etc. Observe that the less sugar these syrups contain the easier the cup shapes will be to freeze and the slower to dissolve. They last longer on the table than the ice creams they are filled with.
Ice cream in shape of eggs: A small number for a party table can be made without moulds by using egg shells of the largest sort. Procure some broad rubber bands from the stationers, such as are used for binding bundles of letter, etc, and half an inch in breadth. Empty the egg shells by making a hole at each end. Fill them with ice cream, soft and just freshly frozen. Draw the rubber bands over them so as to close the holes, brush over with melted butter besides to close all crevices against the salt, them drop them in the freezing tub and cover with the finely pounded ice and salt. Surprise ices: A more elaborate form of the foregoing egg shapes. Fill the shells with a white ice cream only partly frozen and fluid, close with the rubber bands and butter and immerse them in the freezing mixture about 15 minutes for a shell of cream to form inside. Then wash off the outside, remove the bands, pour or scoop out the cream that remains unfrozen in the middle and place the shells in a freezer well packed in ice and salt to freeze dry and crystalized, as already directed for ice cups. After that fill with chocolate ice cream or yellow frozen custard. The variations are endless.
This is a technique rather than a formula: you are casting hollow shells of water ice in a mold chilled from the outside, then filling them with a contrasting cream. Nothing here needs a machine, but the salt-and-ice bath has to be managed properly or the shells never set dry.
- The hinge: pour off and refreezeEverything depends on tipping out the still-liquid center once the shell reaches about an eighth of an inch, then returning the empty molds to the ice so the inner face freezes hard and dry. A shell taken straight from the first freeze is wet, sags, and collapses when filled.
- Keep the sugar lowThe instruction about sugar is the other half of the trick: a lightly sweetened syrup freezes firm, while a dessert-sweet syrup tends to stay slushy in a salt bath and slump on the plate. The recipe gives no proportions, so any figures are a starting point rather than a rule.
- Freezing mixture proportionsCrushed ice with salt in a ratio of about 3 parts ice to 1 part salt by weight will hold the bath well below freezing, which is what the job needs; coarse rock or kosher salt is easier to manage than table salt, though the recipe specifies only 'salt'. Keep the brine level below the rims so it cannot run into the syrup, and top up the ice as it melts.
- MoldsMetal is genuinely better, as the text says: it conducts faster and flexes enough to release the shell. Straight-sided stainless shot glasses, small tumblers or 4 oz metal dariole molds all work. Thin glass tumblers can crack from the temperature shock, and a broken glass in a tub of brine ends the project.
- ScaleFour dozen is hotel quantity. A washtub or a plastic storage bin will take eight to twelve cups comfortably; work in batches rather than crowding, since each mold needs ice packed around it, not just under it.
- Timing and unmoldingFifteen to thirty minutes for the shell, as the recipe says; it does not state how long the second, drying freeze takes, so judge by feel. Unmold with a cloth dipped in tepid, not hot, water and work quickly, or you melt through the wall. Return the finished shells to the freezer on a chilled tray until service.
- "Sorbetiere"A sorbetiere is the metal canister of a hand-cranked ice cream freezer. Where the recipe says to freeze frothed cream in the ice cup set in a sorbetiere, it means stand the filled cup in that canister packed with ice and salt.
- Grape and fruit syrupsMuscatel grapes pressed before full ripeness are the likely source of the pale green colour called for; unripe green table grapes or verjuice will do the same. Concord grape and cherry both give strong colour at low sugar, which is what this needs.
- The eggshell variationRaw eggshells carry Salmonella on the outside and sometimes within, and freezing does not kill it. If you attempt the egg shapes, use shells that have been boiled or held in simmering water for several minutes and dried, and skip the melted butter seal in favor of food-safe silicone bands. Otherwise treat this half of the entry as a curiosity.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for the hotel and restaurant trade in the 1880s and 90s, and this entry is a working chef's answer to a standing problem: how to serve ices ornamentally without owning a cupboard full of pewter molds. The Saratoga in the name most likely points to Saratoga Springs, New York, the mineral-water resort whose grand hotels set the standard for American summer dining in that era and lent their name to more than one kitchen invention. The whole procedure belongs to the age of the ice harvest, when natural ice cut from northern lakes and stored in sawdust was cheap enough that a hotel could keep a washtub of salt and ice standing all afternoon; mechanical refrigeration existed in breweries and packing houses but not yet in the pastry room. What the shells really demonstrate is how much confectioners of the period relied on the endothermic salt-ice bath, which had been used for freezing sweets in Europe since at least the seventeenth century and remained the only cold a cook could count on.