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Pistachio Water Ice
Place six ounces of blanched pistachios in a mortar and pound them to a pulp, adding a little water to prevent them from oiling, turn this preparation out into a basin, and mix in with it one pint of lemon water ice, passing all through a fine hair-sieve into a freezer, then turn out into a mould well packed in ice, and when it has become thoroughly frozen and set, it is ready for use.
A two-part recipe that assumes you already have lemon water ice on hand. The pistachio paste does the flavoring; the lemon base does the freezing.
- Lemon water iceThe original assumes the reader already has this, presumably from the book's own lemon water ice recipe; the text gives no proportions. A workable modern equivalent is a syrup of roughly 2 cups water to 1 cup sugar, cooled, with about 1/2 cup lemon juice and a little grated zest. You need one pint of it, still unfrozen.
- Pounding without oilingSix ounces of blanched pistachios is about 1 1/4 cups. A food processor does the work of the mortar, but pistachios seize into butter quickly; pulse in short bursts and add water a spoonful at a time, exactly as the recipe advises, to keep the paste from breaking to oil.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh strainer. Push the paste through with the back of a ladle and expect to discard a tablespoon or two of skin and fibre; the point is a smooth ice, and unstrained nut pulp reads as grit once frozen.
- "A freezer"In 1896 this means a hand-cranked pail churning in a jacket of cracked ice and rock salt, roughly three parts ice to one part salt. Any modern ice cream machine substitutes directly.
- Moulding and packingPacking the mould in ice is the old method of ripening, which firms the ice and lets the flavor settle. A covered container in the freezer for two to four hours does the same thing. Do not skip it -- straight from the churn this is soft and thin-tasting.
- ColorBlanched pistachios give a pale, dull green, not the vivid shade of commercial pistachio ice cream. Kitchens of the period corrected this with spinach juice or a drop of green coloring; nothing is lost if you leave it alone.
- YieldAbout a generous pint, which is four small servings by the standards of a long Waldorf menu, or two by modern ones.
Water ices -- fruit or nut purées frozen in a sugar syrup, with no dairy -- were a common palate course in late nineteenth-century American hotel dining, often served midway through a long menu though they appear as desserts as well, and the Waldorf kept a long list of them. Building one flavor on another, as here, suggests a kitchen where a lemon base could be turned into pistachio, almond or coffee at short notice, though that workflow is an inference from the recipe itself. The pistachio itself was an expensive import at the time, generally arriving from Sicily or the Levant, which is part of why it signaled luxury on a hotel card. Oscar Tschirky, who compiled this book, was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and the recipes read as they do here: terse notes from a working brigade, assuming the reader already knows what a freezer and a hair sieve are for.