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Coffee Punch (Place gallon of vanilla ice)
Place 1 gallon of vanilla ice cream in a can imbedded in ice and salt, work it well with a spatula in order to make it smooth. Then beat up 12 egg whites with 12 ounces of fine sugar over a slow fire, like a sponge cake; add this and freeze until nearly done. Now give it ½ pint of good strong mocha coffee flavoring and keep freezing for a while longer. Before serving, add one gill of kirschwasser or rum.
This is a fountain-scale frozen punch, closer to a semifreddo than to scoopable ice cream, and the proportions assume a hand-cranked freezer can packed in ice and salt. Everything can be done with a stand mixer and a deep pan in the freezer, but the volume needs cutting unless you are serving a crowd.
- Scale and yieldA gallon of ice cream plus a twelve-white meringue plus a half pint of coffee makes roughly a gallon and a half of finished punch — 30 or more servings in punch cups. Quarter the recipe for a household: 1 quart ice cream, 3 egg whites, 3 oz sugar, 2 fl oz coffee, 2 tablespoons spirit.
- A gillOne gill is half a cup, 4 fluid ounces. The 12 ounces of sugar is weight, not volume — about 1¾ cups granulated.
- The can in ice and saltThis means the metal cylinder of an ice-cream freezer, sunk in a bucket of crushed ice layered with rock salt (roughly 3 parts ice to 1 part salt), which holds the mix well below 32°F. A modern ice-cream machine bowl or a metal loaf pan in the freezer, stirred every 20 minutes, does the same work.
- Softening the base"Work it well with a spatula" means temper the ice cream to a smooth, thick paste with no lumps before anything is folded in. If it is still stiff and pebbly, the meringue will deflate as you fight it.
- The heated meringueWhites and sugar beaten over gentle heat "like a sponge cake" is a Swiss meringue. Set the bowl over barely simmering water and whisk constantly until the mixture reaches 160°F on a thermometer and the sugar has dissolved, then whip off the heat until cool and glossy. That temperature is what makes the raw-egg question moot; do not simply warm it and hope.
- Mocha coffee flavoringThe book means strong brewed coffee or coffee extract, not chocolate. Use half a pint of espresso or triple-strength drip coffee, cooled completely — warm coffee will slacken the whole mixture.
- Why the spirits go in lastAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so kirschwasser or rum added early keeps the punch from setting at all. A gill in a gallon and a half is a small enough proportion to hold, but only if the mixture is already nearly frozen when it goes in.
- ServingThis never freezes hard. Serve it soft in punch cups or stemmed glasses with a spoon, straight from the freezer, and expect it to slump within a few minutes in a warm room.
Soda-fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries doubled as caterers' handbooks, and frozen punches like this one were expensive, egg-rich, spiked, and sold for banquets, weddings and club dinners rather than over the counter. "Mocha" points back to Al-Mokha, the Yemeni port that gave its name to the coffee trade and denoted a coffee origin and variety; the word had not yet been annexed by coffee-and-chocolate drinks. The kirschwasser or rum is a reminder that liquor-flavoured confections had their place at the fountain before Prohibition. The technique, ice cream lightened with a hot-whipped meringue, is the fountain's shortcut to what a French kitchen would have built from scratch as a parfait or bombe.