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Icebergs
Dissolve two cups sugar in three cups boiling water; cool, add three-fourths cup lemon juice, color with leaf green, and freeze. Serve in champagne glasses. Put one teaspoon crême de menthe in each glass, and sprinkle with finely chopped nut meats, using almonds, filberts, pecans, and wal-. nuts in equal proportions. These may be used after the roast and before the game.
A lemon water ice tinted green and finished at the table with liqueur and nuts. It is a palate cleanser rather than a dessert, and everything about the proportions follows from that.
- The syrupTwo cups sugar to three cups water gives a fairly light syrup, which is what keeps this ice firm and granular rather than soft. Stir only until the sugar dissolves, then chill it thoroughly before adding the juice, so the lemon does not cook.
- Lemon juiceThree-quarters of a cup is roughly the yield of four to six lemons, depending on size. Strain it; pulp freezes into gritty threads.
- Leaf greenA green food coloring of the period, sold for tinting ices and frostings. Any modern green food coloring does the job — add it a drop at a time, since today's dyes are much stronger than the ones sold then.
- FreezingWritten for a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. In an ice cream machine, churn until it holds a scoopable slush, about 20 to 25 minutes. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow metal pan and rake it with a fork every 30 minutes for two to three hours, which gives a granita texture closer to the original than a smooth sorbet.
- Serve it slightly softThis is the hinge. A sugar-and-lemon ice with no dairy or egg freezes rock hard if left overnight; move it to the refrigerator for 15 to 20 minutes before serving, or it will not take a spoon and the crème de menthe will simply sit on top.
- FilbertsHazelnuts. Chop all four nuts very fine and toast them briefly if you like; equal proportions is the whole point of the garnish, so measure rather than eyeball.
- Crème de mentheUse the clear (white) version if you want the leaf-green color to read as intended; the green bottling will darken it. A teaspoon per glass is enough — this is a flavoring, not a float.
- YieldAbout five cups of mixture, a little over a quart, which stretches to a dozen or more small servings in champagne glasses. As a between-course ice, portions should be a few spoonfuls at most.
The instruction to serve this "after the roast and before the game" places it squarely in the long formal dinner of the late nineteenth century, where a frozen ice was served midway through the meal to reset the palate before the heavier courses resumed. The best-known example is Roman punch, a rum-spiked ice that appeared on White House and hotel menus throughout the period; Fannie Farmer's Icebergs is a genteel variation, with cr he rum the rum and a green tint and chopped nuts. Such ices belong to the era before mechanical refrigeration in the home, when producing a frozen course mid-dinner depended on an icehouse or regular ice delivery and on the labor to work the crank freezer. Menus of this kind seem to have largely faded from American home entertaining by the early twentieth century, and the between-course ice survives now mainly in tasting menus and wedding banquets.