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Neapolitan Ice Cream
This is no special cream; it merely consists of four different flavors packed in layers into brick molds and cut into slices when served The first layer and cut into slices when served The first layer being orange or lemon water ice, next strawberry ice cream, then chocolate ice cream and last vanilla ice cream.
Less a recipe than an assembly instruction: four separately frozen mixtures layered in a rectangular mold and sliced across. The details that matter are all in the packing and the freezing.
- The brick moldA brick mold was a rectangular tin box with a close-fitting lid, so the block could be packed in ice and salt. Sizes varied. A metal loaf pan lined with parchment, overhung on the long sides for lifting, does the same job.
- Water ice is not sherbetThe first layer is an orange or lemon water ice — fruit juice, sugar syrup and water, with no dairy at all. It freezes harder and tastes sharper than the creams above it, which is the point of putting it at one end.
- Work with each layer at spreading stageEach flavor should go in soft enough to smooth flat but firm enough to hold its line — roughly the texture of thick frosting. Pour in a runny mix and the colors bleed into each other.
- Freeze between layersSpread one layer, level it, and return the mold to the freezer until it is firm before adding the next. Adding a layer onto a soft one is a common reason the finished slices look muddy at the seams.
- The stated orderWater ice, strawberry, chocolate, vanilla runs light to dark and then back to pale, which gives the cut face its banded look. The recipe gives no reason for the sequence; keeping the water ice at one end means it is not sandwiched between two soft creams.
- Ripening and slicingOnce packed, the whole brick needs several hours to freeze solid — overnight is safer. Slice it straight across with a long knife dipped in hot water and wiped between cuts.
- YieldA quart brick cut into inch-thick slices gives roughly eight to ten servings; the recipe itself states no quantity.
The name points to Naples, and the dish is generally traced to Italian confectioners who carried the technique of layered, molded ices — the same family as spumoni and the older pezzi duri, "hard pieces" — into France, Britain and then the United States during the nineteenth century. American soda fountains took up the brick, and it is tempting to read the appeal as commercial rather than culinary: a molded block could be frozen in advance, held in the ice chest, and sold by the slice. The entry itself says only that it is "no special cream." The reduction to the modern three-stripe carton of chocolate, vanilla and strawberry came later; here the defining feature is still the contrast between a water ice and the creams stacked on top of it.