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Maraschino (Green coloring Make a custard)
Green coloring Make a custard of first four ingredients, strain, cool; add cream, chestnut purée, flavoring, and glacé fruit cut in pieces and previously soaked in Maraschino three hours. Color with leaf green; freeze, mould, pack in salt and ice, and let stand two hours. Serve with Fruit Sauce. Drain syrup from a pint jar of canned strawberry, raspberry, or pineapple, heat to boiling-point, thicken slightly with arrowroot, and color with fruit red.
This is the tail end of a moulded chestnut ice cream in the Nesselrode family, printed with its ingredient list on the preceding line of the original book. A few things need translating before it will work in a modern kitchen.
- The missing ingredient list"First four ingredients" refers to a list that this excerpt does not carry over. In period frozen custards the first four are usually milk or thin cream, sugar, egg yolks and salt, but the original quantities here are unknown and should be treated as such; something on the order of 2 cups milk, 3/4 cup sugar, 4 yolks and a pinch of salt is a workable modern starting point.
- Cook the custard properly, then chill hardThe hinge of the whole thing: the custard must thicken enough to coat a spoon at about 170-175F and never go past 180F or it curdles and no amount of straining will save the texture. Strain, then chill thoroughly before the cream goes in — a warm base churns to a grainy ice.
- Chestnut pureeUnsweetened canned or jarred chestnut puree works directly. Sweetened creme de marrons also works but is sugary enough that you should cut the custard sugar back, since excess sugar keeps the ice from setting firm.
- Leaf green and fruit redThese were bottled commercial food colorings sold under trade names of that kind, and are no longer available as such. Use a modern gel food color, a drop at a time, to taste.
- Maraschino here is the liqueurNot the jarred cherries. It means the clear cherry liqueur (traditionally from Dalmatia, distilled from marasca cherries with their stones), and the three-hour soak is what carries its flavor into the glace fruit. Alcohol lowers the freezing point, so it is worth draining the fruit before it goes into the base, though the recipe does not say to.
- Freezing and packingAn ice-cream maker replaces the crank freezer. Churn until thick, pack into a chilled mould, cover the surface with parchment, and firm it in the freezer for two hours or more — that is what the salt-and-ice packing was for, and a home freezer does it without brine.
- The fruit sauceA pint jar of preserved fruit yields perhaps 3/4 to 1 cup of syrup. Slake about 1 teaspoon arrowroot in cold water per cup, add it to the boiling syrup off the heat, and do not boil it again — arrowroot thins out and turns slippery if held at a boil.
- YieldThe original states no yield. Whatever the custard base you settle on will fill a mould of roughly that volume; portion accordingly.
Chestnut puree, glace fruit and maraschino together are the signature of Nesselrode, a frozen pudding generally credited to Mouy, chef to the Russian diplomat Count Karl von Nesselrode, and hugely fashionable in Europe and America through the second half of the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century the formula had spread into dozens of variants, of which this tinted, moulded version is one: a dish shaped in a fancy mould, packed in salt and ice, and colored with commercial dye. The green tint and the scarlet sauce say a good deal about the period's table o a a spectacle as much as a dessert.