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Pistachio Ice-Cream
Place in a saucepan six ounces of pistachios after they have been well scalded, cleaned and pounded, add three-quarters of a pound of crushed loaf sugar and the yolks of eight eggs, a little salt and three breakfast cupfuls of cream (or milk), place over the fire and stir it well until quite thick; then rub it through a fine hair-sieve into a basin and add a tablespoonful of orange-flower water to flavor, two tablespoonfuls of spinach green to color and turn all into the freezer, and when it becomes thoroughly frozen it is ready for use.
A straightforward egg custard base, unusual only in that the pistachios go in at the start and the color comes from spinach rather than a bottle. The hinge is the custard: it must thicken without scrambling.
- Custard temperature"Stir it well until quite thick" means cooking to about 170-180F over low heat or a water bath, stirring constantly. Above roughly 185F the yolks curdle; the sieve that follows will rescue a slightly broken custard but not a badly scrambled one.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is a large teacup, about 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Reckoned at 8 ounces, three of them come to roughly 1 1/2 pints of cream, more if the cup is at the larger end; with 3/4 lb sugar and eight yolks that gives a rich base yielding somewhere in the region of 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 quarts frozen.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a cone and broken up for use; "crushed" simply means reduced to coarse grains. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute, by weight.
- Scalding the pistachiosScalding is blanching: 30 seconds in boiling water loosens the papery skins, which are rubbed off so the green stays clean rather than muddy. Six ounces is presumably shelled weight, and pounding to a paste in a mortar extracts more flavor than chopping.
- Spinach greenA period coloring made by pounding raw spinach, pressing out the juice, and gently heating it so the green solids coagulate and can be skimmed off. Two tablespoons is a lot of concentrate; without it the ice cream is beige, since blanched pistachios give up little color.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually in Middle Eastern groceries and some baking aisles. Modern bottles vary widely in strength, so add half the tablespoon, taste the cold custard, and adjust.
- Hair sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, prized because it did not react with acids or eggs. Any fine-mesh strainer does the same job; press hard, as the pistachio solids carry much of the flavor and only the coarse debris should be left behind.
- The freezerThe original assumes a hand-crank churn packed with ice and rock salt. Chill the strained custard thoroughly first, then churn in any modern machine; "thoroughly frozen" here means the soft-frozen stage, after which it should be hardened in the freezer for a few hours.
Pistachio ice cream belongs to the long line of nut custards that European confectioners built out of the eighteenth-century French repertoire, and Oscar Tschirky's version shows the lineage plainly: yolks and cream cooked to a custard, orange-flower water for perfume, and vegetable green for color. Orange-flower water was the standard partner to almonds and pistachios in older pastry work, well before vanilla became the default; spinach green, or vert d' épinards, was the classic kitchen coloring, made in-house as a matter of course. That the Waldorf's book still calls for both in 1896 places it at the tail end of the pre-industrial confectioner's kit, and the appearance of a nut ice at all may owe something to the spread of cheap ice and mechanical churns, though nut ices, pistachio among them, appear in confectioners' books well before mechanical churning was widespread.