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Baked Alaska Ice Cream
Pack a round mold with vanilla ice cream. Cover and bind the seams of the mold with strips of muslin dipped in melted paraffin. Repack in ice and salt, and stand aside for at least two hours. At serving time turn the ice cream on a folded napkin on a platter. Beat the whites of four eggs until light, add four tablespoons of powdered sugar and whip until light and dry. Cover the ice cream thoroughly with this meringue, and dust well with powdered sugar. Stand the platter on a cold board, and run the whole in a hot oven for a moment to brown. Serve at once.
The method is sound and still used, but the hardware and the meringue proportions belong to a kitchen with an ice cave and a coal range. A few substitutions bring it up to date.
- Freeze it harder than you thinkThe hinge of the dish is a brick-hard core. The two hours in ice and salt is a minimum; in a home freezer give it several hours at least, and overnight is better. A soft centre will slump the moment the meringue goes under heat.
- The paraffin sealStrips of muslin dipped in melted paraffin sealed the seams of the metal mold against brine seeping in from the packing ice. With a freezer you need none of this: line a metal bowl with plastic wrap, fill with softened ice cream, press level, and cover tight.
- A hot oven means 500FA hot oven means as hot as it will go -- 'Hot' in books of this period is generally taken as the upper end of the range, somewhere above 450F. The browning takes one to three minutes and wants constant watching. A kitchen blowtorch does the same job with no oven at all.
- Raw egg white in the meringueThe meringue is uncooked; a moment under high heat colours the surface without heating the interior. Use pasteurized egg whites, sold in cartons, if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised.
- Sugar proportionFour tablespoons to four whites is lean by current practice, which runs to about two tablespoons of sugar per white. The original produces a dry, quickly browning foam that also weeps sooner; increase the sugar if you want a meringue that holds an hour.
- The napkin and the cold board are insulationThe cold board is insulation -- The chilled board keeps heat out of the base; the folded napkin is the period's usual way of serving a frozen sweet, and also stops it sliding. A chilled board still works; a warm china platter does not. Whatever you use must go in the oven, so check it is ovenproof, or assemble on a chilled sheet pan.
- Seal the meringue to the plateNot stated, but essential: spread the meringue right down to the board with no gaps or thin patches. Any bare spot is where the ice cream escapes.
- YieldDepends entirely on the size of the mold, which the recipe does not give. It must be cut and served the instant it leaves the oven; it will not wait.
Baked Alaska is generally traced to Delmonico's in New York, where Charles Ranhofer is credited with popularizing it in the 1870s, the name usually explained as a nod to the 1867 purchase of Alaska. The technique is older than the name: French kitchens served an omelette norvegienne on the same principle, and the underlying observation, that a stiff egg foam is full of air and conducts heat very poorly, is often attributed to Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, in his work on heat around 1800. Its appearance in the Butterick book, alongside the paraffin-sealed mold and the packing in ice and salt, dates the entry to a household that still bought block ice by the cake; the showpiece was a way of proving that the kitchen could produce and hold a frozen dessert at all, which in a house without mechanical refrigeration was the whole point of the performance.