Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › Coup aux Marrons
Coup aux Marrons
Break marron glacé in pieces, flavor with rum, cover, and let stand one hour. Put in champagne glasses, allowing one and one-half marrons to each glass, cover with vanilla ice cream, and garnish with whipped cream, sweetened and flavored with vanilla, and candied rose leaves.
Plombière Glacé Cover the bottom of small paper cases with vanilla ice cream, sprinkle ice cream with marron glacé broken in pieces, arrange lady fingers at equal distances, and allow them to extend one inch above cases. Pile whipped cream, sweetened and flavored, in the centre and garnish with marron glacé and candied violets or glacé cherries.
Demi-glacé aux Fraises Line a brick mould with Vanilla Ice Cream, put in layer of lady fingers, and fill the centre with preserved strawberries or large fresh fruit cut in halves; cover with ice cream, pack in salt and ice, and let stand one hour. For ice cream, make custard of two and one-half cups milk, yolks four eggs, one cup sugar, and one-fourth teaspoon salt; strain, cool, add one cup heavy cream and one tablespoon vanilla; then freeze.
Three assembled ice-cream desserts sharing one base: the vanilla custard ice cream given at the end. Read that last paragraph first, since the first two dishes depend on it.
- The title is a typo"Coup" should be coupe — a stemmed glass, and by extension the dessert served in it. Coupe aux marrons is simply chestnuts under ice cream in a glass.
- Marron glacéWhole chestnuts candied in sugar syrup and glazed, sold in tins and jars in autumn and at Christmas, usually Italian or French. One and a half per glass means a generous portion; a 200 g jar holds roughly 8 to 10. Vacuum-packed unsweetened chestnuts are not a substitute here.
- Make the custard firstCook the milk, yolks, sugar and salt in a double boiler until it coats a spoon, around 170-175°F. Much above that and the yolks begin to curdle, and straining will only catch some of it. Chill it thoroughly before churning — a warm custard freezes coarse.
- Freezing without a machine"Freeze" in 1896 means a hand-cranked bucket churn packed with three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt. Any modern ice-cream maker does the same job; the custard makes about a quart.
- Packing in salt and iceFor the Demi-glacé aux Fraises, the moulded brick was buried in the ice-and-salt mixture to firm up. A covered loaf tin in the freezer for an hour or two accomplishes it, though the original mixture is softer than a modern hard-frozen block and slices best after a few minutes at room temperature.
- Paper casesSmall pleated paper cups, of the same family as modern cupcake liners. Stiff foil or paper soufflé cases hold up better under ice cream, which will soften plain paper quickly — assemble at the last minute.
- Candied rose leaves and violetsBoth would generally have been bought from confectioners. Crystallised violets are still sold; candied rose petals (which is what is meant, not the foliage) are harder to find. Glacé cherries, which Farmer also offers, are the practical stand-in.
- YieldThe custard fills roughly eight coupes or paper cases, or one 1-quart brick mould.
Farmer's frozen-dessert chapter is a snapshot of what an ambitious American hostess in the 1890s understood as French dessert: a plain vanilla custard ice cream dressed up with imported confectionery and given a French name. Marrons glacés and candied violets were shop-bought luxuries in Boston at the time, imported or made by professional confectioners, so much of the cook's work was assembly and presentation rather than sweet-making. The chestnut itself is the sweet European Castanea sativa, candied in graduated sugar syrups over several days, a process generally traced to Lyon and Piedmont, the two regions that still dominate the trade. Serving the coupe in a champagne glass reflects the same period taste for tall stemware at the end of a long dinner, where the ice was often served toward the close of the meal, though the order of service varied.