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Kirsch Ice-Cream
Mix two wineglassfuls of kirsch with one-half wineglassful of cream, add enough sugar to sweeten properly, place it in the freezer, and when it is sufficiently stiff, put it in a mould packed in ice, freeze again, and it is then ready for use. Turn it out onto an ornamental dish.
Four lines of text that conceal a real technical problem: as written this is roughly four parts spirit to one part cream, and alcohol does not freeze in a home churn. Read the notes before you commit any kirsch to it.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is reckoned at 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. So the recipe is about 4 oz kirsch to 1 oz cream, plus sugar — a total volume of well under a cup.
- The alcohol problemKirsch is usually bottled at 40 percent alcohol by volume or more. At that proportion the mixture will not set into anything you can turn out of a mould; alcohol depresses the freezing point sharply, and a batch this spirit-heavy stays a cold slush at any domestic freezer temperature. Ice creams that hold their shape generally keep added spirits to a few spoonfuls per quart of base.
- What it probably wasThe proportions may be reversed — cream by the cupful, kirsch by the spoonful — or the mixture may have been intended as a soft glace au kirsch served in glasses rather than unmoulded. Treat the ratio as unreliable rather than authoritative.
- "The freezer"Not the appliance. In 1896 this is a hand-cranked pail: an inner metal can with a dasher, surrounded by cracked ice and coarse rock salt, turned by hand until stiff.
- "Put it in a mould packed in ice"This second stage is ripening, not a second churn. The mould is buried in an ice-and-salt mixture to firm and mellow the ice for an hour or more. A modern equivalent is the hardening period in the coldest part of a freezer.
- Sugar"Enough to sweeten properly" gives no figure, and sugar also lowers the freezing point, so guessing high compounds the softness. For a cream ice of this size, 1 to 2 tablespoons is the practical range.
- YieldAs given, under a cup of mixture — two very small glasses at most. Anything served as a moulded centrepiece would need the quantities multiplied several times over.
Kirschwasser is a clear brandy distilled from whole black cherries, stones included, which is where its faint bitter-almond edge comes from; the Black Forest and Alsace are its traditional homes, and it reached American hotel bars and kitchens as an expensive imported spirit. Oscar Tschirky, ma"itre d'hôtel of the Waldorf, filled his 1896 book with dishes flavoured by such bottles — kirsch, maraschino, curaçao — though it is worth saying that Tschirky was a dining-room man rather than a cook, and the authorship of the book is not straightforward. The brevity here is characteristic of the book's kitchen sections, which read — though this is interpretation rather than established fact — less like instructions tested for a home cook than like notes set down from professional habit: a chef who had made cream ices a thousand times needed only the reminder of what went in and in what order.