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Sultana Roll with Claret Sauce
Line one-pound baking-powder boxes with Pistachio Ice Cream; sprinkle with Sultana raisins which have been soaked one hour in brandy; fill centres with Vanilla Ice Cream or whipped cream, sweetened, and flavored with vanilla; cover with Pistachio Ice Cream; pack in salt and ice, and let stand one and one-half hours. 1 cup sugar
A moulded ice from the era when every household freezer meant a hand-cranked churn and a bucket of rock salt. The construction is simple; the only difficulty is holding the layers cold enough to work quickly.
- The mouldA one-pound baking-powder box was a cylindrical tin roughly 3 inches across and 4 to 5 inches tall, with a tight-fitting lid. Any straight-sided metal cylinder of about 2 cups' capacity works, or a small loaf pan lined with plastic wrap for lifting the roll out cleanly.
- SultanasSultanas are seedless golden raisins from the white Thompson-type grape. Ordinary dark raisins substitute directly; drain them well after their hour in brandy so the liquor does not keep the cream soft.
- Working temperature is the hingeBoth ice creams need to be at the stiff, just-churned stage, not scoopable-from-the-freezer hard and not soupy. Line the mould with the outer layer, hollow the centre, fill, cap, and get it back into the cold within a few minutes or the layers will bleed together.
- Packing in salt and iceThe ripening pack is usually given as about four parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume, heaped around the sealed mould in a pail with the lid weighted down and the seams sealed against brine. A modern freezer will do the same job, though it may need longer than the hour and a half, and there is no risk of salt water reaching the cream.
- The brandyAlcohol depresses the freezing point, so a heavy hand with the soaking brandy will leave you with a roll that slumps. Squeeze the raisins and use the brandy in the sauce instead.
- ClaretClaret is the English name for red Bordeaux. Any dry, medium-bodied red wine serves; period claret sauces of this kind are generally sugar boiled to a syrup with the wine added, served cold over the sliced roll.
- The stray lineThe "1 cup sugar" at the end is most likely the beginning of the claret sauce's ingredients, cut off in this printing; if so, it belongs to the sauce rather than the ice cream.
- YieldA one-pound box holds roughly two cups, enough for a few small slices; note that the recipe specifies boxes, plural. Dinner menus of the period assume small portions of ice at the end of a long meal.
Moulded ices layered in two or three colours were a standard formal dessert of American and English dinners from the 1870s onward, and cookbooks of the period are full of them under names borrowed from French confectionery practice: bombes, biscuits glaces, and rolls. The "Sultana" label presumably comes from the raisin, which had long been arriving from Smyrna in quantity and by the end of the century was also being grown in California's San Joaquin Valley. What dates this particular version is the mould: a cook with no set of tinned copper bombe forms could simply wash out a baking-powder box from the pantry shelf. Sweetened red wine poured over cold puddings was English practice long before ice cream was a domestic possibility.