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Filling for an Ice Cream Cake
One-quarter box of gelatine; one pint of cream; one teaspoon of vanilla; one tablespoon of wine; one-fourth cup boiling water; one-fourth cup cold water; one-half cup of powdered sugar. Soak the gelatine in the cold water until softened. Whip the cream, placing the froth as it is made in a pan; set in ice water, and when all is whipped, sift over it the sugar. and add the vanilla and wine. Pour the boiling water upon the gelatine, and when the latter is dissolved, strain it over the whipped cream. Then stir (not beat) rapidly, resting the bowl of the spoon upon the bottom of the pan and turning the pan with the left hand while stirring with the right. Stir until the gelatine is thoroughly blended with the cream, and when the filling is nearly stiff enough to drop, spread it on the layers of the cake.
A gelatine-stabilized whipped cream filling, meant to hold its shape between cake layers at room temperature. Most of the instructions are about hand-whipping equipment that no longer exists in most kitchens; the chemistry still works exactly as written.
- The hinge: temperature of the gelatineDissolved gelatine hitting cold whipped cream sets instantly into threads and lumps. Let the dissolved gelatine cool until it is just warm to the touch, then strain it over the cream in a thin stream while stirring constantly. The original's insistence on stirring and not beating also keeps the whipped cream from being knocked down at the last moment.
- "One-quarter box of gelatine"Box sizes were not standard and this is genuinely ambiguous. Boxes of the period ran roughly 1 to 2 ounces of granulated gelatine, so a quarter box is somewhere between one and two modern envelopes (a Knox envelope is ¼ oz / 7 g). For a pint of cream, one envelope gives a soft filling that still slices; two gives something closer to a set mousse.
- The whipping methodSkimming froth off into a separate pan set in ice water was how you got volume from a wire whisk and unhomogenized cream. A stand mixer does the job in two minutes — stop at soft peaks, since the gelatine will firm it further and over-whipped cream turns grainy when stirred again.
- A pint of creamTwo cups of heavy or whipping cream, 36% or higher. Anything labelled light or half-and-half will not whip.
- The tablespoon of wineThe recipe does not specify; a fortified wine such as sherry, Madeira or Marsala is the usual reading for a filling of this kind. It is a flavouring, not a liquid the recipe depends on, and can be left out without affecting the set.
- Powdered sugarModern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which the period product often did not. It does no harm in a gelatine filling, though the half cup makes this noticeably sweet; a third of a cup suits most palates.
- Working timeOnce the gelatine goes in you have a few minutes. Have the cake layers out and level before you start, and spread the moment the filling is thick enough to hold a soft mound on the spoon.
- Yield and keepingEnough to fill and lightly top a two- or three-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. The finished cake must be refrigerated and is best eaten within a day; the filling weeps as the gelatine ages.
The name records a resemblance rather than a method — nothing here is frozen. Through the second half of the nineteenth century "ice cream cake" commonly meant a layer cake filled with sweetened whipped cream set just firm enough to cut, the name often said to come from the filling's resemblance to ice cream between the layers. It belongs to the period in which packaged granulated gelatine, on sale from well before the 1880s, had become a cheap grocery staple in American kitchens, replacing the long business of boiling calves' feet and isinglass, and cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s are full of creams, charlottes and fillings built on a quarter or a half box of it. The elaborate stirring instruction, with the spoon flat on the pan bottom and the pan turned by the left hand, is the sort of detail a writer of the period included because whipped cream was hand-made, expensive in labour, and easily ruined at the last step. Butterick, a pattern company, published its cook book as part of a broader line of domestic manuals aimed at the same middle-class household that bought its dress patterns.