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Madeira Water Ice
Grate the peel of two lemons into a basin, strain in the juice, mix in one and one-half pints of Madeira wine and one-half pint of syrup. Stir well, and then turn it into a freezer, pack it in pounded ice and salt, and work vigorously until frozen. When sufficiently so, put the mixture into a mould, close, and pack it in pounded ice and salt for two hours. Before serving dip the mould in warm water, wipe it, then turn the contents carefully out onto a fancy china or glass dish.
A wine sorbet from the Waldorf's kitchen, frozen in a hand-crank pail and then moulded. The proportions are the thing to watch: this much fortified wine resists freezing, and no amount of churning will overcome it.
- The hinge: alcohol and freezing pointOne and a half pints of Madeira against half a pint of syrup gives a mixture of roughly 12-13 percent alcohol, which will never set firm. An ice-and-salt brine of the kind the recipe calls for runs colder than a modern frozen-canister machine reaches; in a modern ice cream maker expect a slush. Cutting the wine to half a pint and making up the volume with water and lemon juice produces something that actually freezes.
- Syrup"Syrup" in a Waldorf-era kitchen most likely means a stock sugar syrup kept on hand, commonly around equal weights of sugar and water boiled briefly and cooled, though the strength varied. Half a pint of that is roughly 1 cup, carrying somewhere around 5 to 6 oz of sugar.
- VolumeOne and a half pints is 3 cups; half a pint is 1 cup. The finished quantity is a little over a quart, enough for eight to ten small servings.
- Zest, not peelGrate only the yellow of the two lemons. The white pith under it turns bitter in a mixture this sweet and this lightly frozen, where there is nothing to hide it.
- Ice and saltPounded ice and coarse salt in about a 3:1 ratio by volume is the traditional brine, and it is still the right approach for a bucket-style freezer. An electric machine with a frozen canister works, but its temperature ceiling is exactly why a high-alcohol mix defeats it.
- The second packingTwo hours in the mould buried in ice and salt is still-freezing, the step that firms and ripens the ice after churning. A covered container in the coldest part of a modern freezer does the same work, though a very winey mix will only ever reach a spoonable stage.
- UnmouldingA brief dip in warm water and a wipe is correct: seconds, not a soak, or the outer surface melts to syrup and the shape slumps on the dish.
- MadeiraUse a drier Sercial or Verdelho if you want the lemon to read clearly, a Bual or Malmsey for a sweeter, nuttier ice. Cooking Madeira is salted and will taste of it in an uncooked preparation.
Water ices - sugar, water, acid and flavouring, with no dairy - were a fixture of long American hotel dinners in the 1890s, served after the entrees and before the roast or game to reset the palate, the same slot that Roman punch occupied. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name fronted this 1896 book, worked in a kitchen where fortified wines were everyday ingredients: Madeira had been a staple of the American table since the colonial trade, and it survived in hotel cooking as a flavouring for sauces, jellies and ices long after fashionable drinking had moved to French wine. The moulding and the "fancy china or glass dish" belong to the same period logic - an ice was expected to arrive as a shaped object at the centre of the table, not scooped into a bowl.