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Nougat Ice-Cream
Put the nougat in a mortar with two tablespoonfuls of orange-flower water, and pound it. Put the yolks of three eggs in a saucepan with one and one-half pints of cream, and twelve tablespoonfuls of fine sugar and beat. Mix the bruised nougat and three drops of the essence of peach-kernels with the milk and eggs, and stir the whole over the fire till on the point of thickening. Pass the mixture through a fine hair-sieve into a basin and leave till cooled. When ready turn the nougat cream into the freezer and freeze it. The cream can be served as it is or may be turned into moulds and packed in ice for about two hours. Before serving, the mould should be dipped in warm water, wiped, and the contents turned out on a fancy dish.
The custard base and the moulding are conventional, but one ingredient in the list is the reason this page carries a warning.
- Essence of peach-kernelsPeach and apricot kernels contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed or infused. The nineteenth-century "essence of peach-kernels" sold to confectioners was an unstandardised distillate of exactly that material, chemically the same family as oil of bitter almonds, and its strength varied from bottle to bottle. Three drops of an unknown preparation is not a measurement anyone can act on today.
- Why the quantity does not rescue itA small drop count looks reassuring, but it is small relative to a strength nobody recorded. There is no way to reconstruct what preparation was being poured from, and no way to bound the dose in a frozen dessert.
- The custard is a secondary issueYolks and cream stirred only "till on the point of thickening" is an unmeasured cook, and the mixture then sits to cool before freezing. Modern practice takes an egg custard to a verified temperature and chills it quickly. Use a current ice-cream custard recipe rather than trying to time this one by eye.
- Nougat, in this bookNougat, here -- The instruction to pound it in a mortar points to the hard almond-and-caramel nougatine of the pastry kitchen rather than the soft aerated confection. Note that the mixture is then passed through a fine hair-sieve, so the flavour is carried by infusion rather than by grit left in the cream.
- Orange-flower waterA distillate of bitter orange blossom, still sold for baking and unrelated to the kernel essence. Two tablespoons is a generous hand by present-day taste, and modern bottles vary in strength.
- Freezing and mouldingThe cream is first churned in 'the freezer', the ice-and-salt pail of the period; the filled mould is then buried in a salt-and-ice packing to harden and set it. Dipping the mould in warm water before turning out is still standard practice.
Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms rather than its stoves, compiled this book from the repertoire of a hotel kitchen working squarely in the French tradition, and the nougat ice cream is a good example: pounded nougatine folded into a cooked custard is the classic glace au nougat of the nineteenth-century French repertoire, moulded and turned out as a centrepiece rather than scooped. Bitter-kernel flavourings were routine in that tradition, since almond, peach and apricot kernels all yield benzaldehyde and were, it is often said, treated as more or less interchangeable by confectioners reinforcing the almond note in praline work. The toxicity of hydrocyanic acid was well understood in 1896 he listlisted strict limits for these essences — but the concentration in a given confectioner's bottle was not something a cookbook could specify, and most modern almond flavouring is a synthetic that carries none of it, though prussic-acid-free natural bitter almond oil is also sold. The recipe survives here as a record of how a grand hotel built a dessert, not as something to follow.