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Maraschino Ice-Cream
Place two quarts of cream in a pan on the fire. Whisk the whites of two eggs to a froth, then add the yolks of eight eggs beaten up with one pound of powdered white sugar; stir them lightly together, and when the cream boils, add to it by degrees, whisking all the time. Place the mixture over the fire and let it boil two times, still whisking; then run it through a sieve. When it is cold mix it with three liqueur glassfuls of Maraschino, place in a freezer, cover, and freeze it.
A straight French custard base flavored with maraschino, written for a hand-crank freezer and a coal range. The wording is terse and one instruction in it will ruin the batch if taken literally.
- Do not boil the custardEight yolks in boiling cream will scramble, and the direction to sieve afterwards may well be an acknowledgement of that. Cook the mixture to about 170-175F, when it coats a spoon, and strain regardless.
- Maraschino means the liqueurNot the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Maraschino is a clear, dry-ish distillate of marasca cherries and their pits, still made in Italy and Croatia; the flavor is almond-bitter rather than sweet.
- A liqueur glassSmall: commonly around an ounce in period glassware, though sizes varied. Three of them is on the order of 3 fl oz, which is still a fair amount of alcohol in a frozen mixture.
- Alcohol and freezingThat much spirit lowers the freezing point noticeably. The ice cream will churn soft and stay soft; expect a loose, scoopable texture rather than a firm block, and give it a long hardening period in the coldest part of the freezer.
- SugarA pound to two quarts of cream is about 2 1/4 cups, sweet by modern taste but not extreme for a period ice cream, where sugar also does the work of keeping the texture smooth. Powdered white sugar here means fine granulated, not confectioners' sugar with cornstarch in it.
- The egg whitesTwo whites are whisked to a froth and the yolk-and-sugar mixture stirred lightly into them. Any lift is slight and the froth will not survive cooking; this is not a meringue.
- "Place in a freezer"The freezer is the churn: a canister set in a bucket of ice and rock salt, cranked by hand. Any modern ice cream machine does the same job. Chill the strained custard thoroughly overnight before churning, and add the maraschino cold.
- YieldAbout three quarts churned, enough for a dozen or more servings. Halving the recipe is sensible for a domestic machine.
Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf as ma tre d'h tel in 1893 and put his name to this book in 1896, though he was famously not a cook himself; the recipes came out of the hotel's kitchens. Maraschino, generally traced to the distillers of Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, was one of the prestige liqueurs of nineteenth-century European and American dining, and it turns up constantly in hotel dessert work of the period -- in punches, in jellies, poured over fruit, and folded into ices. An egg-yolk custard frozen in a salt-and-ice churn was the standard luxury ice cream of the era. The association of the word with bright red cocktail cherries came later, after American producers began preserving cherries in flavored syrup rather than in the liqueur itself.