Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Ginger Ice-Cream
Ginger Ice-Cream
Put the yolks of eight eggs into a saucepan with three-quarters of a pound of sugar and work it with a wooden spoon until quite frothy; stir in a pint of boiling milk and a little orange or lemon flavoring. Let it get cold and place in the freezer until it thickens. Put half a pound of preserved ginger into a mortar, pound it well, pass it through a fine sieve and add first a few tablespoonfuls of rum and then a few tablespoonfuls of the ice. When these ingredients are exhausted, place it again in the freezer, work it, and when firm, place on a paper on a dish in the form of rocks, and serve.
A rich custard ice cream from the Waldorf's kitchen, written for a hand-cranked freezer and a cook who already knew how to make a custard. Two lines need translation before it makes sense.
- The "freezer" is a churnIn 1896 a freezer meant a pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt around an inner canister with a dasher. Any modern ice-cream maker stands in for it; the instruction to "work it" is the churning.
- "A few tablespoonfuls of the ice"This means the part-frozen custard itself, not ice cubes. You slacken the pounded ginger with rum and then with spoonfuls of the chilling cream until the paste is loose enough to fold back in smoothly.
- Cook the custardThe recipe implies but never states it: after the boiling milk goes in, the mixture must be returned to gentle heat and stirred to 170-180F, until it coats the spoon. Eight yolks scalded once by a pint of milk are not reliably set or safe.
- Weights in cupsThree-quarters of a pound of sugar is about 1 3/4 cups. Half a pound of preserved ginger is roughly 1 cup of drained stem ginger, chopped.
- Preserved gingerNot crystallised ginger and not fresh. Look for stem ginger in syrup, sold in jars; drain it before pounding. A food processor replaces the mortar, and the sieving is what keeps the finished cream from turning stringy.
- Go easy on the rum"A few tablespoonfuls" is the right scale -- two or three. Alcohol depresses the freezing point, and a heavier hand leaves the cream permanently slack.
- Flavouring"A little orange or lemon flavoring" means grated zest or a few drops of extract, added off the heat so it does not cook away.
- The "rocks"The dessert was moulded into irregular craggy lumps on paper set on a platter, a Victorian conceit. It needs to be very firm -- several hours in the freezer after churning -- to hold the shape.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight to ten.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel whose name sits on this book, was compiling recipes at a moment when preserved ginger had become a fashionable luxury in American kitchens. Ginger in heavy syrup arrived from Canton in glazed stoneware jars, and its presence on a dessert menu signalled an imported ingredient rather than a pantry staple -- which is why the recipe treats half a pound of it as the whole point of the dish. Ginger ice cream itself belongs to a long line of nineteenth-century flavoured custard ices, made possible by the crank freezer that put churned ices within reach of any hotel kitchen with a steady supply of ice and rock salt. The finishing touch of moulding the cream into "rocks" on paper reflects the period's taste for dressed-up presentation, where an ice was expected to arrive looking like something other than an ice.