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Pistachio Fruit Ice Cream
3 cups milk 1½ cups sugar Yolks 5 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 pint heavy cream 1½ cups chestnut purée 1 teaspoon almond extract 1 tablespoon vanilla ¾ cup glacé fruits
This is a French-style custard base with chestnut purée and candied fruit folded in. The list gives quantities only, so the handling is up to the cook.
- The hinge: cook the custard, do not scramble itScald the milk with the sugar and salt, temper it into the beaten yolks, then cook over simmering water, stirring, until it coats a spoon, around 170-175F. Pushed much past that the yolks begin to curdle; straining will take out lumps but will not restore a broken texture.
- Chill before churningStrain the custard, cool it, and refrigerate several hours or overnight. A base going into the machine at 40F or below freezes faster and finishes smoother than one merely cooled to room temperature.
- Chestnut purée1½ cups is roughly 12 oz. Canned French chestnut purée comes both unsweetened (puree de marrons) and sweetened (creme de marrons). The 1½ cups of sugar here assumes the unsweetened kind; with the sweetened, cut the sugar by about a third.
- Heavy creamThe pint may be whipped to soft peaks and folded into the cold custard before freezing for a lighter result; added unwhipped in a modern machine it gives a denser one. The list itself does not say which.
- Glacé fruitsChop them small and stir them in during the last minute of churning, not at the start, or the paddle will drive them to the bottom. Soaking them briefly in a spoonful of kirsch or brandy keeps them from freezing into hard pellets.
- FlavoringA tablespoon of vanilla and a teaspoon of almond extract is a heavy hand by modern standards. Start with two teaspoons of vanilla and a half teaspoon of almond and taste the cold base before freezing.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts finished, serving 12 to 14. Ripen it in the freezer an hour or two before serving — the chestnut makes a base that scoops best when firm.
Chestnut purée was a luxury import in the Boston kitchen of the 1890s, sold in tins from France alongside the glacé fruits that give this ice its confectioner's character. Ice creams of this sort — a cooked yolk custard enriched with whipped cream and studded with candied fruit — belong with the biscuits glacés that American cooking schools taught as the mark of a properly ambitious dessert course.