Home › Ice-Creams and Ices › Neapolitan Ice Cream
Neapolitan Ice Cream
Prepare one pint each of strawberry and pistachio ice cream and of orange ice. Pack a mold in salt and ice and spread the strawberry cream smoothly over the bottom. When this has been hardened sufficiently arrange the orange ice upon it in a nice layer and as soon as this hardens spread over it the pistachio cream in the same manner. Then lay a piece of heavy white paper over the mold, pack it in ice and salt and let it stand two hours. The above combination of colors and flavors may be varied to suit the taste.
L
This is an assembly recipe rather than a cooking one: three finished ices are layered in a mold and hardened between additions. The whole thing stands or falls on temperature control.
- The hinge: work cold and fastEach layer must be firm before the next goes on, or the colors bleed into a muddy band. Chill the mold in the freezer beforehand and return it there between layers, spreading each pint quickly with an offset spatula.
- Salt and ice, or a freezerThe original packs the mold in ice and salt, without specifying quantities; a working brine is commonly about three parts ice to one part salt by volume, which holds a bath well below 32F. A modern freezer at 0F does the same job with no drainage problem; give each layer 30-45 minutes and the finished mold at least four hours rather than two, since a freezer works more slowly than a brine bath.
- The heavy white paperThat is a seal against salt water and ice crystals, laid over the surface before the lid or the final packing. Plastic wrap pressed directly onto the ice, then foil, does the same and does it better.
- Orange iceA water ice - what we would call a sorbet: orange juice, sugar syrup and often a little lemon, churned without dairy. In the original it goes between the two creams; the recipe gives no reason, though the contrast in both color and sharpness is the obvious effect.
- Pistachio creamSome period pistachio ice creams relied on green coloring and almond flavoring rather than on nuts, pistachios being expensive, though recipes using pounded pistachios also appear. Real pistachio paste gives a duller green and a far better flavor.
- Softening before layeringIce cream straight from a churn is at spreading consistency; ice cream from the freezer is not. Let each pint sit out five to ten minutes until it takes a spatula smoothly, and no longer.
- UnmoldingDip the sealed mold in warm water for five to ten seconds, run a thin knife around the rim, and invert onto a chilled platter. Return it to the freezer for twenty minutes before slicing if it has softened at the edges.
- YieldThree pints of finished mixture, about six cups, which cuts into ten to twelve slices.
Neapolitan is the tricolor block that Italian ice-cream makers - many of them from Naples and the surrounding country - carried into Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century, and the name attached itself to the technique of setting contrasting flavors in stripes rather than to any one combination. The strawberry-vanilla-chocolate version familiar from later factory cartons is only one arrangement; the Butterick book's strawberry, orange and pistachio is a more characteristic Victorian choice, and the closing line explicitly invites the cook to substitute. Molded ices of this kind were often associated with the formal dinner, and their appearance in a pattern company's cook book - Butterick sold dress patterns - says something about how thoroughly the ambitions of the fashionable table had spread beyond the households that kept a professional cook.