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Fromage Glace
This delicate dish is something like a frozen Tom and Jerry, needing neither cream nor milk. Make a boiling syrup, 1½ pounds of sugar with 1 pint of water. Next beat up 28 egg yolks with ½ pound powdered sugar and slowly stir in the syrup, put in freezer and freeze. Then add ¾ of a pint of kirschwasser, and lastly 6 beaten egg whites. Fill in paper cases of any size and place them in the ice cave.
A soda-fountain frozen dessert in the older French style, and one of the clearest examples of why period ice-cream formulas do not transfer to a modern kitchen: the eggs here are never cooked to a safe temperature, and there are a great many of them.
- Why it failsTwenty-eight yolks are tempered with hot syrup and then put straight into the freezer; six whites go in raw at the end and are never heated at all. Neither the yolk base nor the whites reach a pasteurizing temperature, and freezing does not kill Salmonella, it only halts its growth. A current frozen-custard or semifreddo recipe, built on a cooked base or on pasteurized eggs, should be used instead.
- The scale is the second problemThis is fountain-trade quantity: roughly two and a half pounds of eggs and sugar plus about a pint and three quarters of liquid, enough to fill a great many paper cases. It is a batch scaled for a shop counter rather than a home freezer.
- "½ pounds of sugar""½ pounds of sugar" -- The original reads as printed and is genuinely ambiguous: half a pound of sugar to a pint of water makes a thin syrup, one and a half pounds a heavy one. There is no way to tell from the text which was meant.
- KirschwasserClear, unsweetened cherry brandy distilled from whole cherries, pits included (traditionally morello varieties), and still sold under that name, often as kirsch. Three quarters of a pint is a substantial dose of spirit, which is also structural: alcohol depresses the freezing point and keeps a milkless mixture from setting hard.
- Paper cases and the ice caveThe cases are the pleated paper cups a fountain served individual ices in. The "ice cave" is a lidded, ice-and-salt-packed cabinet used for holding and hardening frozen desserts, the fountain's equivalent of a hardening freezer.
- "Freezer"In this period the word normally means a hand- or motor-cranked churn surrounded by ice and rock salt, not an insulated cold box. The instruction to freeze, then stir in kirsch and whites, then mold, is consistent with the churn-and-harden sequence of that equipment.
- Tom and JerryThe comparison is to a hot holiday drink of egg beaten with sugar and spirits and served with hot water or milk. The author's point is that this is an egg-and-liquor mixture, which is why he says it needs neither cream nor milk.
Fromage glacé — literally "frozen cheese" — is a French confectioner's term for an ice molded in the shape of a cheese, or set in the small cylindrical molds used for cheeses; by the nineteenth century it had drifted to mean any rich molded ice, and the name survived long after the shape did. The particular type here is thickened with egg yolks and syrup rather than cream, and so needs no milk. Its appearance in a soda-fountain manual reflects what American fountains were by the 1900s — no longer just carbonated-water counters but small pastry kitchens turning out ices, frappés and molded desserts, borrowing their vocabulary wholesale from French confectionery while pricing them for a drugstore clientele.