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Burnt Walnut Bisque
2 cups scalded milk Yolks 3 eggs 1 cup sugar ⅔ cup chopped walnut meats 1 cup heavy cream ¾ tablespoon vanilla Few grains salt Make custard of milk, eggs, one-third of the sugar, and salt. Caramelize remaining sugar, add nut meats, and turn into a slightly buttered pan. Cool, pound, and pass through a purée strainer. Add to custard, cool, then add one cup heavy cream, beaten until stiff, and vanilla. Freeze and mould. 3 pints cream 1½ cups sugar
A frozen custard flavoured with walnut praline — caramelized sugar poured over nuts, cooled hard, then crushed to powder and stirred into the base. The praline step is where the flavour lives, and it is also where the dish most often goes wrong.
- Take the caramel far enough"Burnt" is meant literally in the sense of a deep amber, almost mahogany, caramel — around 350F. Pale caramel disappears into the custard and leaves only sweetness. Pull it off the heat the moment it smells nutty and faintly bitter, because it will keep darkening in the pan.
- Cook the custard to 170-175FStir the milk, yolks, one-third of the sugar and the salt over low heat or a water bath until it coats a spoon. Above about 180F the yolks curdle; strain the finished custard as insurance.
- The vanilla quantityThe measure printed here is unclear. Three-quarters of a tablespoon (about 2¼ teaspoons) suits the volume; a full tablespoon is not excessive with this much caramel and cream.
- Pounding the pralineA mortar was the original tool. A food processor does it in seconds, but pulse rather than run it — walnuts are oily and will slide into paste. The "purée strainer" step simply removes the coarse bits; a medium sieve is enough, and the pieces held back can be folded in at the end if you want texture.
- Butter the pan generouslyButter the pan lightly -- Caramel welds itself to metal. A thin film of butter on a sheet pan, or a silicone mat, is what lets you lift the slab off in one piece.
- FreezingThe book assumes a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and rock salt. An ice cream machine works directly; chill the base thoroughly first, since the whipped cream folded in will otherwise deflate as it warms.
- "Freeze and mould"Moulding means packing the churned mixture into a chilled form, sealing it, and burying it in ice and salt for two to three hours to ripen and firm. A loaf tin in the freezer for three to four hours achieves the same thing.
- YieldAbout 1½ quarts, serving eight to ten.
Frozen desserts built on a cooked custard and a praline powder come out of nineteenth-century French confectionery, where pralin — caramelized sugar set over almonds, then crushed — was a standard flavouring kept in a jar and spooned into creams and ices. American cooks sometimes substituted walnuts for the almonds. The word "bisque" here has nothing to do with soup: in period ice-cream terminology a bisque was a cream ice containing crushed dry material, most often macaroons, nuts or crumbled cake, and the name is generally traced to the idea of something baked or twice-cooked being stirred through. Fannie Farmer's ice chapter reflects a moment when the hand-cranked freezer had become ordinary household equipment rather than a luxury, and recipes like this one — several stages, none of them difficult — assume a cook with an afternoon and a supply of ice.