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Iced Madeira Sauce
¼ cup orange juice ½ cup sugar 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 cup boiling water ½ cup Madeira wine Whites 2 eggs Freeze fruit juice and wine; boil sugar and water, pour on slowly to beaten whites of eggs, set in pan of salted ice-water, and stir until cold. Add to frozen mixture.
Cocoanut Naples, Sauterne Sauce Shape vanilla ice cream in individual moulds, and roll in shredded cocoanut; serve with
A frozen wine sauce from the ices chapter, built on an uncooked meringue. The technique is recognisable, but as written the eggs are never brought to a safe temperature, and several of the quantities have been mangled in transcription.
- Why the cautionThe whites are set by a syrup of sugar and boiling water that is given no temperature and no boiling time. A thin 1:1 syrup poured slowly into cold beaten whites lands the mixture well below any pasteurising temperature, and the sauce is then chilled and frozen rather than cooked. Nothing in the process kills Salmonella. Use a current recipe if you want a frozen meringue sauce.
- The syrup step is not the same as cookingModern Italian meringue works because the syrup is taken to roughly the firm-ball stage, far hotter than boiling water, and carries enough heat to bring the whites up with it. This recipe gives no boiling time and no thermometer stage, so how hot the syrup was when it met the whites cannot be recovered from the text.
- Fractions checkedThe quantities were checked against the printed page: a quarter cup of orange juice, half a cup of sugar, one cup of boiling water, and half a cup of Madeira. The proportions balance the two tablespoons of lemon juice as printed.
- Salted ice-waterIce with salt stirred through it drops well below 0C, which is why it appears both as the cooling bath here and as the freezing medium in the hand-cranked freezers this chapter assumes. Plain iced water will not do the same job.
- "Freeze fruit juice and wine"Alcohol depresses the freezing point, so this base never sets hard. Expect a slushy, spoonable granita rather than a solid ice, which is plausibly the intended texture for a sauce.
- MadeiraAny medium Madeira answers; the sweeter Bual and Malmsey styles suit a dessert sauce better than dry Sercial. The supermarket "cooking Madeira" sold with added salt is not a substitute.
- The trailing lines"Cocoanut Naples, Sauterne Sauce" is the beginning of the next entry, not part of this one. The Madeira sauce recipe ends at "Add to frozen mixture."
Frozen and half-frozen wine sauces run through the ices chapter: Madeira here, Sauterne in the entry that follows. Madeira itself had a long hold on American tables -- fortified for the sea voyage and improved rather than spoiled by heat, it was a standard "company" wine of the eastern seaboard from the colonial period onward, though its vogue had faded considerably by the end of the nineteenth century. The method, hot syrup beaten into egg whites, is a domesticated version of the confectioner's Italian meringue; what the home version lacks is the thermometer discipline that makes the step reliable.