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Sugar (Pint heavy cream cup powdered)
1 pint heavy cream ⅔ cup powdered sugar 1/2 tablespoon vanilla ½ cup chopped walnut meats Mix fruit juices and sweeten to taste. Turn mixture in brick mould. Whip cream, and add sugar, vanilla, and nut meats; pour over the first mixture to overflow mould; cover with buttered paper, fit on cover, pack in salt and ice, and let stand three hours.
This is a still-frozen layered ice — a fruit-juice base under sweetened whipped cream with walnuts, frozen in a brick mould without churning. The printed text has lost the fruit-juice quantities, so treat that layer as a matter of judgment rather than measurement.
- Missing measurementsThe ingredient list covers only the cream layer. The "fruit juices" of the first mixture are given no quantity in this text, and no fruit is named; plan on roughly a cup of strained juice sweetened until it tastes slightly too sweet, since freezing mutes sugar and acid.
- Brick mouldA rectangular tin box with a tight-fitting lid, made to be buried in ice so the finished ice could be sliced into neat bricks. Sizes varied; this quantity of cream, whipped, plus the fruit layer will need something larger than a quart. A metal loaf pan of similar capacity, tightly covered with foil, does the same job.
- Powdered sugarIn this book powdered sugar means finely ground granulated, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Either works here; modern confectioners' sugar adds a faint starchiness but dissolves readily in cold cream.
- Salt and icePack crushed ice and coarse rock salt around the sealed mould in layers, roughly three parts ice to one part salt by volume, in a bucket or cooler that can drain. The brine must come up the sides of the mould, not merely sit under it. A home freezer set to 0F will also do it, and more reliably.
- Buttered paperA greased round laid on the surface kept the ice from sticking to the lid and helped exclude brine. Parchment or plastic wrap pressed against the surface serves the same purpose; the seal matters, because salt water seeping past the lid will ruin the whole mould.
- Overflow the mouldFilling to overflowing is deliberate: it leaves no air pocket under the lid, so the brick freezes solid and brine has less chance to work its way in. Level the surface before covering rather than compacting the cream.
- Three hoursThree hours in salt and ice gives a firm brick. In a domestic freezer allow four to six hours, and let the mould stand at room temperature five minutes before unmoulding and slicing.
- YieldA brick of this size cuts into roughly six to eight slices.
Still-frozen creams of this kind — called mousses, parfaits or simply moulded ices depending on the book — were the household answer to ice cream before mechanical refrigeration. Nothing is churned: air comes from the whipped cream, and the mould is simply buried in a salt-and-ice mixture whose brine falls well below the freezing point of water. The brick shape existed because it sliced cleanly, and layered bricks with a fruit stratum under a nut-studded cream turn up often in turn-of-the-century dessert courses. Frozen desserts of this sort are a reminder of how much labour ice was worth: an icehouse or a delivery route made them possible, and cookbooks of the period assumed a reader with access to both block ice and rock salt.