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Flowering Ice Cream
Line two and one-half inch flower-pots with paraffine paper. Fill with ice cream, cover cream with grated vanilla chocolate to represent earth, and insert a flower in each.
A presentation trick rather than a formula: you supply the ice cream, and the flower-pot does the work. A few of the materials have changed names or safety status since 1896.
- Paraffine paperThis is waxed paper, a nineteenth-century product already familiar by the 1890s. Parchment paper is easier to press into a small pot and releases just as cleanly.
- The potsTwo-and-a-half inch clay pots are still standard nursery stock. Wash and dry them, and cover the drainage hole from the inside with a scrap of the paper before lining, or the cream will weep out as it softens.
- "Vanilla chocolate"In period usage this meant plain sweet eating chocolate flavored with vanilla, not white or vanilla-flavored coating. Grate a dark sweet bar on the coarse side of a box grater; the shards look far more like soil than cocoa powder does.
- Choose the flower carefullyThe stem sits in food and children will eat around it. Use unsprayed, non-toxic blooms such as rose, violet, pansy or nasturtium, and avoid florist stock, which is routinely treated. Lily of the valley, sweet pea, daffodil, oleander and hydrangea are all toxic and appear in period bouquets.
- FirmnessPack the pots with ice cream that has just been churned or briefly softened, smooth the top, and return them to the freezer for at least an hour before adding chocolate and flower. A soft fill slumps away from the rim and the illusion collapses.
- Yield and servingA 2.5-inch pot holds something under half a cup, so a quart of ice cream will fill roughly eight or nine; measure your own pots with water to be sure. Serve each pot on a small plate with a spoon; the paper lining lets a diner lift the whole block out if preferred.
Late nineteenth-century American entertaining prized the dessert that pretended to be something else, a taste inherited from French entremets and encouraged by cheap commercial ice and hand-crank freezers, which made frozen desserts a possibility for ordinary households rather than a luxury of the wealthy. Waxed paper, which the recipe calls paraffine paper, was a comparatively new convenience, and its appearance here as a mold liner shows how quickly such products were absorbed into kitchen practice.