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Macaroon Ice-Cream
Dry six ounces of macaroons in the oven. Remove them to the table to cool, place them in a mortar, pound, sift thoroughly, and lay a sheet of paper over; have ready a vanilla ice-cream, add it to the sifted macaroons, and mix them thoroughly with the spatula for five minutes, and with this fill a three-pint mould and cover it tightly. Have a pail ready with room for broken ice and rock-salt at the bottom, lay the mould in and fill up the pail with more ice and salt. Let it freeze for two hours and when it is ready to serve, dip the mould into warm water, turn the cream out onto a fancy dish, and serve right away.
A moulded ice rather than a churned one: the vanilla ice-cream is already made, and everything here is about flavouring it and setting it in a shape. Work quickly and cold.
- Which macaroonIn 1896 a macaroon meant a crisp almond-and-egg-white biscuit, close to what is now sold as amaretti, not the coconut haystack or the French macaron. Six ounces is about 170 g, roughly two cups of crumbs once pounded and sifted.
- Drying themThe recipe gives no temperature; a low oven, around 275-300F, for ten to fifteen minutes drives off moisture so the crumbs stay sandy in the cream rather than dissolving into paste. Cool them completely before crushing or they will clump.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does this in seconds; pulse rather than run, then sift out the coarse pieces and re-grind them. The sheet of paper laid over the sifted crumbs is presumably to keep them dry and dust-free while the ice-cream is fetched.
- Temper the ice-creamLet the vanilla soften at room temperature just until it takes a spatula, then fold in the crumbs and get it into the mould. Five minutes of beating a fully hard ice-cream will melt it at the edges and coarsen the texture.
- Three-pint mouldSix cups in all, so the ice-cream and crumbs together should come to about three pints. Any lidded metal mould or loaf pan works; press a sheet of parchment against the surface and cover tightly, since salt water creeping under a loose lid ruins the whole thing.
- Ice and salt, or the freezerThe pail is a packing freezer, not a churn: the two hours are for hardening a mixture already frozen. Traditional packing is about three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt by volume. A domestic freezer at 0F does the same work in three to four hours with no salt risk.
- UnmouldingDip for five to ten seconds only, in warm not hot water, and wipe the mould dry before inverting. Any longer and the outer quarter-inch slumps.
- YieldThree pints serves eight to ten. Cut with a knife dipped in hot water so the macaroon crumbs do not drag.
Oscar Tschirky presided over the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and his 1896 book, largely a compilation, reflects the hotel's kitchen at the height of the moulded-ice era, when a dinner of any pretension ended with a frozen sweet turned out of a fluted or bombe-shaped mould and carried in whole. Flavouring a plain vanilla with pounded almond macaroons is an old confectioner's economy of effort: the biscuit supplies almond, sugar and a little texture at once, and versions of it appear across nineteenth-century ice books. The two hours in ice and salt are the step modern readers most often misread, since the freezing was done earlier in a separate freezer; the packed pail only holds and hardens the shape, a job the household freezer now does invisibly.