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Neapolitan Ice-Cream
Make one pint of vanilla ice cream, one pint of raspberry water ice and one pint of pistachio ice cream. Take a long brick-form mould, holding three pints, put the raspberry water ice at the bottom, arrange the vanilla cream on top, and fill up with the pistachio, and cover tightly. Set the mould on broken ice, mixed with rock salt, at the bottom of a pail; fill up the pail with more ice and salt, and freeze for two hours. Plunge the mould in warm water to wash off the ice and salt, and turn the cream on a piece of paper laid on the table. Dip a long knife in warm water, cut the brick lengthwise through the middle, divide each piece into three, so that the Neapolitan will then be in six equal-sized pieces, each having the three kinds of cream. Dress on a cold dish, with a fancy paper on top, and serve.
This is an assembly recipe: the three component ices are made elsewhere, and what follows is the moulding, packing and cutting. The whole thing hinges on temperature control at the layering stage.
- The hinge: layer semi-frozen, not softEach ice must be firm enough to hold its own line but soft enough to spread — roughly the texture of thick frosting, straight from the churn or after 10 minutes out of the freezer. Layer one, level it, and return the mould to the freezer for 20-30 minutes before adding the next, or the colours will bleed into each other.
- QuantitiesThree pints total, one pint each of vanilla, raspberry water ice and pistachio. A standard 9x5-inch loaf pan holds about 8 cups and is too large; a 1.5-quart terrine or narrow brick mould gives the proportions Oscar wants. Line it with plastic wrap or parchment for clean release.
- Ice and rock saltThe salt-and-ice pail is a freezing bath, not merely storage: salt lowers the melting point of ice well below freezing, to as cold as about -6°F at full saturation and generally somewhat warmer in practice. Use roughly one part rock salt to six or eight parts crushed ice by volume, and pack it right up over the top of the sealed mould. A home freezer at 0°F does the same job overnight with no mess.
- Two hours is a minimumTwo hours in a well-packed salt bath will set the brick; two hours in an ordinary freezer often will not, particularly at the centre. Four to six hours, or overnight, is safer for clean slicing.
- UnmouldingThe warm-water dip is to rinse brine off the outside of a metal mould, not to melt the ice cream. Keep it to a few seconds and keep water away from the seam. If you have lined the mould, lifting the liner out is cleaner still.
- CuttingDip the knife in hot water and wipe it dry between every cut. A wet blade drags and smears the colours together, which defeats the point of the whole exercise.
- Raspberry water iceA water ice is a sorbet — fruit purée, sugar syrup, no dairy. It freezes harder than the two cream layers, so let the assembled brick sit at room temperature for five minutes before slicing or the water-ice layer will shatter.
- PistachioPeriod pistachio ice cream was often tinted green with spinach juice or a vegetable colouring, and sometimes flavoured partly with bitter-almond essence. Modern pistachio paste gives a truer flavour and a duller colour; that is the honest version.
- YieldSix slices, as written — a substantial portion by current standards. Cutting each of the six in half again gives twelve dessert servings from the same brick.
Neapolitan ice cream takes its name from Naples, which had a long reputation for Italian ice-making, and the striped brick form is generally traced to Italian confectioners who carried the trade north and west through the nineteenth century. The defining feature was never the specific flavours but the brick construction: distinct layers moulded together and cut across so each slice shows all of them. Oscar Tschirky's version, from the Waldorf kitchens at the turn of the twentieth century, still specifies vanilla, raspberry water ice and pistachio — a combination older than the vanilla-strawberry-chocolate trio American freezer cases later standardised on. A salt-and-ice pail of the kind he describes was the usual way to hold a moulded ice hard in a commercial kitchen before mechanical refrigeration, and the "fancy paper on top" is a reminder that this was plated service in a hotel dining room, where presentation carried as much weight as the ice itself.