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Spongada, Fromage Glace, or Sponge Ice
Sort of frozen "Tom and Jerry"--needs no milk or cream. 24 yolks of eggs. 6 whites of eggs. 2 pounds of sugar. 1 pint of water. 1 pint of kirschenwasser, or half as much maraschino, curacoa, or a little peach brandy.
Make a boiling syrup of the sugar and water and pour it to the yolks previously beaten light. Beat the mixture till cool, pour it into a freezer and continue beating with the wire egg whisk, turning the freezer with the other hand, till it is pretty well frozen, then add the liqueur a little at a time, and then the whites of eggs whipped firm. It looks like a very spongy cake. Can be be put in paper cases large or small, or filled in a frozen charlotte.
Another variety of the foregoing may be made by freezing 2 quarts of syrup with chocolate dissolved in it, and when nearly finished add 12 whites of eggs whipped light, and beating all together.
The receipt for glace a la creme Napolitaine originally promulgated by M. M. Bernard and Urbain-Dubois from the royal palace at Vienna, perhaps some thirty years ago, had no reference to the brick shape of tri-colored ices of the present fashion. It was--3 decil de creme double, trois quarts de litre de sirop a 25 deg., 15 jaunes d'oeufs, 1 orange zeste--approximately a pint of double cream, a pound of sugar and a half a pint of water, 15 yolks, and orange flavor, concocted together by the Italian method, i.e. the boiling syrup poured to the yolks, and the mixture beaten up like sponge cake batter, the whipped cream incorporated with it, and the light product frozen quickly. Neapolitan molds: These are in the form of a cigar box or brick; can be made much longer if desired. If ordered from a tinner have them made with two bids and no bottom instead of box-like with one lid; let the rim of the lids have thick wire soldered on to rest upon another wire soldered on the box--much the same as ice cream freezer lids are made.
Neapolitan is the English word; Napolitaine is the French. These are among the words that break us all up with our bills of fare.
This is a professional pastry cook's spumone base — a pâte à bombe extended with liqueur and meringue — and the failure point is the egg, not the technique.
- The raw whites are the problemThe six whipped whites (and the twelve in the chocolate variation) go in at the end and are never heated at all. Freezing does not kill Salmonella Enteritidis; it simply holds it. The mixture is then held frozen and served cold, so nothing downstream corrects it.
- The yolk base is not reliably pasteurized eitherThe boiling syrup (2 lb sugar to a pint of water) poured onto twenty-four cold yolks and beaten until cool does raise the temperature, but nowhere in the method is any temperature held for any length of time, and the mass is large enough that the syrup's heat is diluted immediately. Treat it as an uncooked custard, not a cooked one. If you want a frozen sabayon-style ice, use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg products or a base cooked to temperature.
- The alcohol does not sterilize itA pint of kirsch across roughly four pounds of base is well under any concentration that would inhibit bacterial growth, and it is added before the whites, not after.
- KirschenwasserKirsch — clear, unsweetened cherry brandy distilled from whole fruit including the stones. It is not the sweet red cherry liqueur sold under similar names; the alternatives offered (maraschino, curaçao, peach brandy) are sweeter and more strongly flavoured, which may be why only half as much is called for.
- "Sirop à 25 deg."A sugar syrup measured on the Baumé saccharometer, the standard density scale of the nineteenth-century French kitchen. Whitehead gives his own working equivalent in the same breath — a pound of sugar to half a pint of water — which is the useful reading of it.
- Décilitre and paper casesThree decilitres of double cream is nearer half a pint than the pint given in the text, so the equivalents here are rough; a litre is a shade over a quart. The "paper cases" and the frozen charlotte mold are both serving vessels.
Spongada is one of several nineteenth-century names for a whipped, aerated frozen sweet of the spumone type, whose whole point, as the text says, is that it needs no milk or cream, the loft coming from egg and boiling syrup instead; the identification with spumone/spumante is a reasonable reading rather than a stated one. The comparison to a frozen Tom and Jerry would have been exact for his readers: that was the hot eggnog-style bar drink of egg, sugar and spirits, so a cold spongada is the same materials frozen and beaten stiff. The digression on glace à la crème Napolitaine is a shot across the bows of fashionable American menu-writing: Émile Bernard and Urbain Dubois, co-authors of La Cuisine Classique (1856), had used the name for a rich orange-scented custard ice, not for the striped brick that American caterers were by then calling Neapolitan. Whitehead wrote The American Pastry Cook for hotel and restaurant kitchens, and the closing grumble about Neapolitan versus Napolitaine — "among the words that break us all up with our bills of fare" — is the voice of a working pastry chef watching his trade's vocabulary drift loose from its recipes.