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Italian Meringue
1/2 cup sugar. 1/4 cup water. 1 tablespoon gelatine or ¼ teaspoon granulated gelatine Whites 3 eggs 1 cup thin cream ½ tablespoon vanilla Make syrup by boiling sugar and water; pour slowly on beaten whites of eggs, and continue beating. Place in pan of ice-water, and beat until cold; dissolve gelatine in small quantity boiling water; strain into mixture; whip cream, fold in whip, and flavor.
Bombe Glacée Line a mould with sherbet or water ice; fill with ice cream or thin Charlotte Russe mixture; cover, pack in salt and ice, and let stand two hours. The mould may be lined with ice cream. Pomegranate or Raspberry Ice and Vanilla or Macaroon Ice Cream make a good combination.
Two related items run together here: a gelatine-set Italian meringue used as a frozen dessert base, and the bombe glacée built from it. The text as printed has lost part of its ingredient list, so read the notes before shopping.
- Missing quantitiesThe instruction says "make syrup by boiling sugar and water," but neither appears in the ingredient list as transcribed. Standard proportion in books of this period is about 1 cup sugar to ½ cup water; treat that as a reconstruction, not the author's figure.
- The gelatine lineThe line gives a choice between a tablespoon of sheet or shredded gelatine, measured loosely, and a quarter teaspoon of the granulated kind, which is far more concentrated. The printed page reads as our text now gives it. One envelope, about 2¼ teaspoons, of modern powdered gelatine will set this quantity of mixture softly, which is what you want in a frozen dessert.
- Syrup stageThe recipe gives no temperature. Modern practice for Italian meringue is to boil the syrup to about the soft-ball stage, roughly 235-240F, and pour it in a thin steady stream down the side of the bowl while the whites are beating; books of this period more often specify only that the syrup threads from the spoon, which is cooler. Poured too cool it weeps, poured too hot it sets into threads in the whites.
- Egg whitesHot syrup raises the whites well but does not reliably hold them at a pasteurizing temperature, and the finished dessert is never cooked. If you are serving anyone vulnerable, use pasteurized whites.
- "Thin cream"Around 18-20 percent butterfat, closest today to light cream. It whips poorly or not at all, so for the folded-in "whip" use heavy cream. Note that the original lists only the one cup of thin cream and directs that it be whipped; substituting heavy cream is an editorial fix, not the recipe's own wording.
- Beating over iceThe pan of ice-water is there because the meringue must be fully cold before the whipped cream goes in, or the cream slackens. A stand mixer running on medium for eight to ten minutes does the same job without the ice bath, but check the bowl with your hand before folding.
- Freezing the bombe"Pack in salt and ice" describes a wooden bucket with rock salt and crushed ice around a metal mould, the method used before mechanical freezers. A modern freezer does it: chill the mould, line it with sherbet in an even layer, freeze until firm, fill, cover with parchment and foil, and give it four hours rather than two, since a mould buried in ice-and-salt brine loses heat far faster than one sitting in still freezer air.
- Unmoulding and yieldDip the mould in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled plate. The recipe gives no yield; depending on how much air the meringue and cream take up, the base will come to a quart or somewhat more, which suits a 1½-quart mould once it has been lined with ice.
Italian meringue takes its name from the method rather than any Italian origin claim that can be documented; French pâtisserie has distinguished meringue italienne, cooked with boiling syrup, from the plain French kind since at least the nineteenth century, and American cookbooks adopted the term wholesale. Its appearance in the ices chapter of the Boston Cooking School book is telling: stiffened with a little gelatine and lightened with cream, it becomes a base that freezes smooth without churning, which mattered a great deal in a kitchen where freezing meant a hand-cranked bucket of ice and rock salt. The bombe glacée that follows belongs to the same world of formal service, a moulded, two-layered frozen dish meant to be turned out whole at the table. The combinations Farmer suggests, raspberry ice against macaroon ice cream, show the period's taste for contrast in both color and texture in a single moulded sweet.