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Baked Alaska
Whites 6 eggs 6 tablespoons powdered sugar 2 quart brick of ice cream Thin sheet sponge cake Make meringue of eggs and sugar as in Meringue I, cover a board with white paper, lay on sponge cake, turn ice cream on cake (which should extend one-half inch beyond cream), cover with meringue, and spread smoothly. Place on oven grate and brown quickly in hot oven. board, paper, cake, and meringue are poor conductors of The heat, and prevent the cream from melting. Slip from paper on ice cream platter.
Pudding Glacé 2 cups milk ¼ teaspoon salt 2/3 cup raisins 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1 tablespoon flour 1 quart thin cream 1/2 cup almonds ⅓ cup candied pineapple ½ cup Canton ginger 3 tablespoons wine Scald raisins in milk fifteen minutes, strain, make custard of milk, egg, sugar, flour, and salt; strain, cool, add pineapple, ginger cut in small pieces, nuts finely chopped, wine, and cream; then freeze. The raisins should be rinsed and saved for a pudding. 2½ cups milk 1 cup sugar 1/8 teaspoonful salt 2 eggs Frozen Pudding I 1 cup heavy cream 1/4 cup rum 1 cup candied fruit, cherries, pineapples, pears, and apricots Cut fruit in small pieces, and soak two or three hours in brandy to cover, which prevents fruit from freezing; make a custard of milk, sugar, salt, and eggs; strain, cool, add cream and rum, then freeze. Fill a brick mould with alternate layers of the cream and fruit; pack in salt and ice and let stand two hours.
The dish works on one principle: the ice cream must be frozen hard and completely sealed, and the oven must be hot enough to color the meringue before the heat reaches the cream. Everything below serves that.
- The hinge: freeze hard, seal completelyThe brick should be frozen solid, ideally overnight, and the meringue must touch the cake all the way around with no gaps. Any bare spot or air pocket lets heat in and the cream slumps.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; a modern equivalent for browning quickly is roughly 450-500F. Preheat fully and brown for 3-5 minutes, watching constantly; a slower oven gives the heat time to work downward.
- "Powdered sugar"In Farmer's day powdered sugar was sugar ground finer than granulated, not the modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Superfine or caster sugar is the closest substitute; beat until no grains remain between your fingers.
- Sugar quantitySix tablespoons to six whites is lean by current practice, which runs closer to two tablespoons per white. The meringue will be soft and less stable, so assemble and bake it immediately rather than letting it stand.
- Raw whitesA few minutes at high heat browns the surface without bringing the interior of the meringue to a safe temperature. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized whites or a cooked meringue.
- Board and paperA wooden board or a heavy rimmed baking sheet lined with parchment does what the white paper did. Both insulate; do not substitute a bare metal pan, which conducts heat straight into the cream.
- The brickA two-quart brick mould gives a rectangular block. A loaf pan of two-quart capacity lined with plastic wrap works, packed and frozen firm, then turned out onto the cake.
- Cake baseThe recipe calls for a thin sheet of sponge cake, cut so it extends half an inch beyond the ice cream on every side, as directed. Trim it before the cream goes on, not after.
- Yield and servingThe book gives no yield; two quarts makes a large dessert, ample for eight to twelve. Slip it onto a chilled platter and cut with a hot knife at once; it will not hold.
Baked Alaska belongs to a small family of nineteenth-century show dishes built on the fact that beaten egg white and cake are poor conductors of heat, a trick often traced to Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, and served in France as omelette norvegienne. The American name is generally linked to the 1867 purchase of Alaska, and the dish was a fixture of hotel and restaurant dining rooms by the time this book appeared. Its presence in a domestic manual is a sign of the period's ambition: with a hand-cranked freezer, a salt-and-ice pack and a good coal range, a home cook was expected to produce the same set pieces as a professional kitchen.