Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › Ice à la Margot
Ice à la Margot
Serve vanilla ice cream in champagne glasses. Cover ice cream with whipped cream, sweetened, flavored with pistachio, and tinted very light green. Garnish with pistachio nuts or Malaga grapes cut in halves.
This is an assembly, not a cooked dish: the whole thing stands or falls on temperature and on doing the layering at the last minute.
- The champagne glassChampagne glasses of the period were often the shallow, wide-bowled coupe, though taller flute and tulip shapes were also in use. A modern flute is an awkward shape for this; use a coupe, a small stemmed dessert glass, or a wide-mouthed wine glass.
- Chill everythingFreeze the glasses at least half an hour before serving. A room-temperature bowl will slump the ice cream before the cream goes on, and the whole point of the dish is a clean layered look.
- Pistachio flavoringThe book says only "flavored with pistachio," which in period usage would most likely mean a pistachio extract or flavoring; such extracts are now hard to find and generally poor. A tablespoon or two of unsweetened pistachio paste beaten into the cream gives real flavor; almond extract, used sparingly, is a reasonable substitute if paste is unavailable.
- The green tintPistachio itself contributes almost no color. "Very light green" is the instruction that matters: a drop or two of coloring, stopped well short of mint-green, or a pinch of matcha for a duller natural cast.
- Sweetened whipped creamFor four to six glasses, whip a cup of heavy cream with about 2 tablespoons of confectioners' sugar to soft peaks. Whip it stiff and it will not settle over the ice cream properly; whip it loose and it slides off.
- Malaga grapesMalagas are large seeded muscat grapes, still sold in some markets but no longer common. Halve and seed them; any firm seedless green or red grape halved lengthwise serves the same purpose.
- Pistachio nutsBuy them shelled, unsalted, and blanch briefly in boiling water to slip the skins if you want the bright green the recipe implies. Chop coarsely and add at the table so they stay crisp.
- YieldThe original gives none. A quart of ice cream and the whipped cream from a cup of heavy cream fills about six coupes generously.
Composed ices of this kind fill several pages of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, and they belong to a moment when American home entertaining was borrowing from the vocabulary of the French restaurant. The construction is a coupe: ice cream in a stemmed glass, dressed with cream, nuts, or fruit, and given a proper name. Such names were often taken from operas, plays, and their leading ladies, though the source of "Margot" here is not documented. The recipe also reflects the spread of commercial ice and the hand-cranked freezer in middle-class kitchens, which made ice cream a component that could be plated, garnished, and dressed up for company. Malaga grapes, imported from Spain and sold through the winter, were a mark of a well-stocked table.