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Coup Sicilienne
1 shredded pineapple 3 oranges (pulp) 3 bananas sliced 2 tablespoons Maraschino 1 tablespoon lemon juice Few grains salt Powdered sugar Mix ingredients, sweeten to taste, and chill. Serve in champagne glasses having glasses two-thirds full. Cover fruit to fill glasses with Strawberry Ice II and garnish with strawberries and angelica.
Coup a l'Ananas Cut canned sliced pineapple in pieces, pour over pineapple syrup to which is added Orange Curaçoa, allowing one-half as much syrup as fruit, cover and let stand one hour. Fill champagne glasses one-third full, add vanilla ice cream to fill glasses, and garnish with candied cherries and candied pineapple cut in pieces.
Vanilla Ice Cream I (Philadelphia) 1 quart thin cream 3/4 cup sugar 1½ tablespoons vanilla Mix ingredients, and freeze.
COUP SICILIENNE. COUP À L'ANANAS. - Page 442.
COFFEE ICE CREAM SERVED IN HALF OF CANTALOUPE. - Page 445. VANILLA ICE CREAM SERVED IN HALF OF CANTALOUPE WITH FRUIT GARNISH. - Page 442.
BOMBE GLACÉE. - Page 452.
JUNKET ICE CREAM WITH PEACHES. - Page 448.
Three linked items sit on this page: a fruit coupe, a pineapple coupe, and the plain Philadelphia vanilla that fills the second. All are assembly work, so the only real decisions are ripeness, sweetness, and how cold everything is when it reaches the table.
- The hinge: everything must be very coldFruit at room temperature will quickly melt the ice into syrup at the table. The recipe says only to chill, so give the macerated fruit a good couple of hours, and chill the glasses before filling.
- "Coup" means coupeA coupe is a shallow stemmed glass, and by extension the fruit-and-ice dessert served in one. The book's "champagne glasses" are the wide saucer-shaped coupes of the period, roughly 4 to 5 oz; a modern coupe or a small wine glass works the same way.
- Shredded pineappleThis means fresh ripe pineapple, cored, then pulled into coarse threads along the grain with a fork rather than cut in cubes. One medium pineapple gives about 3 cups. Canned crushed pineapple, well drained, is the pragmatic substitute.
- Maraschino is a liqueurNot the pink syrup from a jar of cherries. Use a dry Italian maraschino such as Luxardo; two tablespoons in this quantity of fruit is a background note, not a flavour of its own. Orange Curaçoa in the second coupe is orange curaçao.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term meant finely ground sugar without cornstarch, closest to today's superfine or caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar will work but may leave a faint chalkiness in cold fruit juice. Sweeten after the fruit has stood, since ripe pineapple and orange vary widely.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stem, sold in bright green strips and used for its colour as much as its taste. It is now a specialty item; candied citron or thin strips of candied lime peel serve the same decorative purpose.
- Thin creamLight cream, about 18 to 20 percent fat. Modern heavy cream at 36 percent will freeze hard and greasy in this eggless Philadelphia base; use light cream or half heavy cream and half whole milk.
- "Mix ingredients, and freeze"This assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. An ice cream machine does the same job; chill the mixture thoroughly first, and let the finished ice cream firm in the freezer an hour before scooping.
- YieldThe fruit mixture will fill six or more coupes two-thirds full, depending on the size of the glasses. The vanilla ice cream is built on a quart of cream, so it makes rather more than the pineapple coupe needs.
The coupe belongs to the era when American hotel and society dining borrowed its dessert vocabulary wholesale from French service, and the ices chapter reads like a catalogue of what a well-run dinner of the period might send out: bombes, ices moulded in melon halves, fruit under coloured ice in stemware. The Sicilian name is decorative rather than geographical, in the same spirit as the pineapple coupe's s titles signalled a kitchen fluent in French menu-writing. Worth noting is the Philadelphia vanilla that accompanies them: cream, sugar, vanilla and nothing else, with no eggs and no cooking. That style is generally traced to the city where it is said to have been the commercial standard, and cookbooks of the period often distinguished it from the richer boiled custard ice creams, which they tended to call French. Fresh pineapple and bananas appearing casually in a Boston dessert also mark the moment, when both had become ordinary in northern markets after a generation in which they were luxuries.