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Biscuit Glace a la Bijou
Blanch ½ pound of sweet almonds, 1 ounce of bitter almonds, finely pound them in a stone mortar with 1 gill of orange flower water, then add 1 quart of water and strain through a cloth. This liquid is known as almond milk. Put this in a pan and add 14 egg yolks and 1 pint of syrup of 33 degrees on the syrup gauge, heat in a hot water bath until it thickens, then remove and beat ten minutes longer. Next beat up a scant pint of double cream, add this with an Italian meringue mixture of 2 egg whites. Fill in bricks and imbed same in salted ice until frozen firm. Then turn out the bricks and cut them in slices with a knife dipped in hot water, and spread a thin coating of cherry ice over the surface of each slice, now place them as finished in a fancy paper case, depositing them in the so-called ice cave, which consists of a can with many partitions or shelves imbedded in ice. This dessert may be made by using strawberry, raspberry, peach pulp or any other flavor than almond milk. One pint of water and 1 pint of pulp to the above formula, but adding the corresponding flavor as coffee, vanilla, etc.
This is a frozen almond-custard brick from the era when soda fountains competed with pastry shops, and it turns on an ingredient that is no longer sold as food in the United States. The notes below explain the units and the specific hazard rather than offering a workaround.
- Bitter almonds are the problemAn ounce of bitter almonds is roughly 25-30 kernels. They contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding them in a mortar with orange flower water accomplishes. Nothing in this method applies heat high enough or long enough to drive that off, and the mixture is then frozen and eaten cold.
- Why the dose matters hereToxic thresholds for bitter almond are commonly given as a few dozen kernels for an adult and far fewer for a child. This formula divides into a dozen or more single-portion slices, but the poison is not distributed by any reliable rule, and a single slice cannot be assumed to be a safe fraction. Raw bitter almond kernels are not sold as food at retail in the US. If you want this dessert, use a current recipe built on almond extract or another flavor.
- Sweet almonds, blanchedBlanching here means pouring boiling water over the nuts and slipping off the brown skins, so the milk stays white. The same operation on sweet almonds alone is entirely ordinary; it is the bitter ounce that makes the formula unusable.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Orange flower water in that quantity is assertive by modern palates, which are no longer accustomed to floral distillates in dairy.
- Syrup at 33 degreesAlmost certainly the Baume hydrometer scale, the usual way of measuring syrup density in confectionery work. Thirty-three degrees Baume is a heavy sugar syrup, around 60 percent sugar by weight.
- Italian meringue of two whitesWhites beaten while hot syrup is streamed in, giving a stable, partially cooked foam. Along with the whipped cream, it aerates the mixture, since nothing here is churned in a machine.
- Salted ice and the ice caveIce mixed with rock salt drops well below freezing, and it is the refrigeration this method relies on throughout. The "ice cave" is simply a partitioned tin sunk in more ice — a holding cabinet for finished portions, not a further stage of cooking.
- ScaleFourteen yolks, a pint of syrup and a pint of cream is a commercial batch, yielding several bricks and dozens of slices. It was written for a fountain doing volume, not for a household freezer.
Biscuit glacé is a French pastry term with nothing to do with biscuits in either the British or American sense: a frozen custard-and-cream mixture set in a rectangular mold, turned out and sliced like a loaf, so that each portion showed a flat face that could be masked with a contrasting ice. "À la Bijou" — jewel-style — is often taken to refer to that finish, the slices dressed in ruby cherry ice and set into pleated paper cases, though the reading is a plausible guess rather than an established one. Its appearance in an American soda-fountain manual is telling: by the turn of the twentieth century the better fountains were selling themselves as confectioners' salons, and dispensers seem in at least some cases to have worked from the same French repertoire, and with the same Baumé hydrometer, as a hotel pastry chef. Bitter almond was the standard route to intense almond flavor before commercial benzaldehyde extract displaced it, and recipes of this vintage call for it freely, generally in the small proportion to sweet almonds seen here. That proportion was a matter of taste, not of measured safety, and the ingredient has since left the food supply.